ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Footgun

Definition, Meaning & Examples

Part of speech noun

Quick meaning: Footgun is a noun meaning (programming slang, humorous, derogatory) Any feature likely to lead to the programmer or user shooting themselves in the foot.

Meaning

(programming slang, humorous, derogatory) Any feature likely to lead to the programmer or user shooting themselves in the foot.

More Meanings

  1. (idiomatic) To shoot oneself in the foot.
  2. by extension, generalised from (1.): An opportunity or object that allows the unfortunate to mostly figuratively but sometimes literally shoot themselves in the foot. A less obvious footgun may be a pitfall (1.).

Example Sentences

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.
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.
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, […]

Word Forms

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include footsie, footslog, footer, foothook, flatfoot, fat-finger.

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Sources & Attribution

FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary data is provided by FreeDictionaryAPI.com and sourced from Wiktionary under its stated license.