Meaning of footgun | Babel Free

Definitions

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

Examples

“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, […]”

“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.”

CEFR level