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Holdover instances
Ratings here (
, 
) indicate level of [annoyance (category)], not the degree to which it is a holdover.
Computer/[Software (category)]-related
Data formats / APIs / HTML tags / bad practices
[Preserved only for backwards compatibility (category)]
I bet old, deprecated tags like and old, bad HTML coding practices are still supported in modern browsers to maintain compatibility with old HTML documents. People expect their HTML pages, if they've ever displayed correctly, to always appear "correctly" -- they would be pretty surprised if one day their page that used to show up fine suddenly stopped working in newer browsers. So that's a challenge that web browser developers have to live with.
And it's probably not just web pages either -- anything dealing with a document/data format that used to be one way: if you make a previously valid/accepted technique/etc. no longer valid, you lose compatibilty.
Even function signatures / APIs can become brittle and resistant to change for the sole reason of maintaining backwards compatibility -- fearing (knowing) that any changes to the API would break existing (old) code that uses this library.
Spreadsheet functions
[Preserved only for backwards compatibility (category)]
Functions like Mid, ... were originally from Microsoft Excel but now appear in OpenOffice and Google Spreadsheets, I believe, only to maintain competitive compatibility with Excel documents. These functions probably go back even farther than that -- I bet they're holdovers from Microsoft's Basic!
80-character hard wrapping in source code / text files
Where did the 80 characters come from?
Back in the day! Back in the day when terminals were a fixed number of characters wide and tall (what was it, 80 x 30??)...
Well, we no longer live in that day, folks! Today we all have big huge monitors (some of us have wide-screen LCDs, even!) and we can make our terminal windows / editors as wide as we want.
Moreover, because of your ability to make it wider, you're just, well, ... stupid if you don't make use of that screen real estate.
I would keep this peeve to myself, perhaps, if it were as simple as that. But if you write your code with a 80-char line-wrap, then I have to read it that way!
Since it's a hard wrap, I can't just let my editor reflow it... Instead, I get to see a full half of my screen go completely unused when viewing files that have this 80-char line-wrap. What a waste!! Not only is this horizontal space going unused, it causes things to use more vertical space than they need to -- meaning I have to scroll more! I don't want to scroll more!
Do you want to scroll more? I personally would rather have 1 page of text fit in one page of my viewport, rather than having it take 2 pages, which I then have to scroll between!
One example of many who still have the 80-character-wide habit:
.../validates_as_email/lib/validates_as_email.rb
# Huge credit goes to Dan Kubb <dan.kubb@autopilotmarketing.com> for # submitting a patch to massively simplify this code and thereby instruct me # in the ways of Rails too! I reflowed the patch a little to keep the line # length to a maximum of 78 characters, an old habit.
Personally, I try to wrap at 130 instead of 80... seems a bit more reasonable to me.
8.3 filenames
REFERER
Part of HTTP standard.
Spelled wrong. And forever will be, because it's part of the standard now, that everyone's using!
about:blank, about:help, etc.
Context: Web browsers
My biggest complaint is that about:blank (which just shows a blank page) has nothing to do with the term "about". A blank page isn't "about" anything!
I think this pseudo-protocol/namespace would have been better called "browser":
browser:aboutbrowser:helpbrowser:blank_page
vim being backwards compatible with vi
[Preserved only for backwards compatibility (category)]
Why does it try to hard to maintain compatibility with vi? Who cares about vi compatibility?? vi stinks. vim is cool, but it would be a lot cooler if it stopped caring at all about vi and just did its own thing.
vim's scripting language
I haven't actually checked yet, but I've used vim's scripting language enough to know that it's different from every other language I've ever used. And that bothers me.
It's needlessly different in its syntax.
How many times have I tried to comment out a line by doing # and it complained about a syntax error? Oh that's right, vim uses " for comments!
How many times have I tried to separate two statements with a ; (the standard statement separator in 99% of languages) and it complained about a syntax error? Oh that's right, vim uses | to separate statements!
LDAP
"Lightweight" [Irony (category)][Funny names (category)]
SOAP
"Simple" [Irony (category)][Funny names (category)]
SIGFPE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGFPE.
FPE is an acronym for floating-point exception. Although SIGFPE does not necessarily involve floating-point arithmetic, there is no way to change its name without breaking backward compatibility.
Other contexts
911
I've heard that Europe uses 999 as its emergency number... 999 makes more sense to me. Sure, it's easier to accidentally call, but it's also easier to dial in an emergency (and easier to remember), and I think that's a more important consideration.
the term "scale" (in the context of numerical precision)
I don't know who originally came up with these names/definitions, but I just noticed them in the bc man page:
.000001 has a length of 6 and scale of 6.
1935.000 has a length of 7 and a scale of 3.
scale is a bad name because it can mean so many other things.
I think "precision" would have been a better name for it...
But I think the name has stuck.
The chapter/verse divisions in the Bible
There are quite a few instances where the chapter division is at a relativitely poor spot, or shouldn't be there at all (two chapters should be one).
There are also a number of verses that actually be two verses, or where the verse starts or end in just not the best spot.
(Category: Bad standard but at least it's a standard) Oh well, whoever came up with the verses and chapters could have done a better job, but at least it's better than not having chapters and verses at all! Or having two competing standards. Since we have only one standard system of chapters/verses, we can communicate with each other much more effectively about where in the Bible we're referring to.
Indians
Everyone knows that the "Indians" in the USA are not actually from India and that the name "Indian" resulted from mistakenly thinking that they had landed their ship on India.
The name was a mistake. But it stuck. And we still use it today.
Why? Why can't we let go of it?
Some people try to be more correct and say "Native Americans". But that description seems ambiguous to me -- isn't anyone who was born in America a "Native American"? I like Canada's name, "First Nations people" better...
} End Holdover instances
Use of the term "holdover"
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Text_table Text table - MediaWiki
The text table holds the wikitext of individual page revisions. Field names [old_id, old_text, old_flags] are a holdover from the 'old' revisions table in MediaWiki 1.4 and earlier.
Article metadata
Alias: Carryovers, Hold over, Carry over, Bad ideas that continue to persist/exist today Things that could have benefited from more up-front design effort, Things we've inherited and now are stuck with
See also: He who comes first wins