😅 Self-criticism 💻 Feature is outdated 🙏 A plea for safety

deprecation

1 7.5

Marking a software feature as old and warning that it will be removed

noun
/ˌdɛprɪˈkeɪʃən/

Specialized

: deprecación

After the deprecation warning, users were encouraged to avoid using the legacy functions in their applications.

Examples

Part of the corporatization of humanity has been the deprecation of these types of activities because they are not easily profitable on the corporate scale.

Blog text (32)
Refactorings are essentially never 100% effective, especially as the code base is shipped offsite with public APIs; this is precisely why Java has a deprecation facility.

Blog text (30)
The software update announced the deprecation of several outdated features to improve performance.
Developers were notified of the deprecation of the old API, allowing them to transition to the new version.

Surface Forms

deprecation singular

deprecations plural

Morphology

deprecation = deprecate (semi-transparent) = deprecate + ion

Formally a regular nominalization, but the computing sense ('mark as obsolete/discouraged for use') is a specialized extension of 'express disapproval' and may not be immediately obvious to a general B1 learner.

Etymology

Deprecation keeps the idea of 'saying something is against' from Latin de- ('away') and precari ('to pray'), but in computing it became a formal warning that a feature is not wanted and will be removed. So, a software deprecation is a way of telling programmers 'do not use this' before it disappears.