footgun

English

Etymology

From foot +‎ gun.

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Noun

footgun (plural footguns)

1. (programming slang, humorous, derogatory) Any feature likely to lead to the programmer shooting themself in the foot.
   • 2015, Kyle Simpson, You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN:

     This is a footgun! ES6 should have specified that it either fulfills, rejects, or just throws some sort of synchronous error. Unfortunately, because of precedence in Promise libraries predating ES6 Promise, they had to leave this gotcha in there, […]

   • 2017, Evan Burchard, Refactoring JavaScript: Turning Bad Code Into Good Code, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 262:

     If it is what Douglas Crockford might call a “footgun,” then at the very least, condoning and standardizing the “footwounds” will make problems easier to search for and fix.

   • 2021, Joseph Edmonds, Lorna Jane Mitchell, The Art of Modern PHP 8, page 295:

     Let's have a look at one of the ways a service locator can become a foot gun. We're going to look at the anti-pattern of using the DI container directly in your code, thereby breaking inversion of control and generally shooting yourself in the foot.

Verb

footgun (third-person singular simple present footguns, present participle footgunning, simple past and past participle footgunned)

1. (idiomatic) To repeatedly shoot oneself in the foot.