In Gary Bernhardt's talk about Ruby and JavaScript surprises, what does "wat" mean?

Question

There's a video of a conference presentation by Gary Bernhardt about surprising behavior in the Ruby and JavaScript computer programming languages.

At the beginning of the video, Seth asks the audience:

You guys know what 'wat' means?"

[He makes a 'wat' sound. He also shows a silly photo of a donkey, perhaps on a boat, wearing some waterproof clothing and holding a cat.]

Someone from the audience replies with some reply which is inaudible in the video.

Seth tells the audience member:

Exactly, exactly.

Well, what does "wat" mean? I did a Web search for the query [ wat sound ], but didn't get any answer.

Answer 1

Unforgettableid is correct, it is synonymous with "what" as in exclaiming surprise or bewilderment at a given situation.

I disagree somewhat with the quoted material, however, which states that 'wat' arrived in its current shortened form just for ease of typing.

Chat slang is a method of typing long words and phrases as short one-to-four letter words and is also used by people who have difficulties spelling. For example, instead of typing out "are", someone may only type "r." Although chat slang can be easier for you and sometimes faster to type, it makes it difficult to read and most people will ignore you.

I think the 'h' gets dropped precisely because it connotes a more sound-like visceral reaction.

I believe that the person exclaiming 'wat' is such a state of surprise that they are participating more in sound than language and want to directly connote this feeling to the reader in a kind of playful tongue-and-cheek way. My answer might be too in the realm of speculation or linguistics but maybe not, I'll give it a go.

Answer 2

After five minutes of online research, I found out the answer.

"Wat" isn't a sound: it's a word. It's a piece of Internet slang meaning "what"; in this situation, it's used to express disbelief at these particular idiosyncrasies of Ruby and JavaScript.

Of course, it's generally a silly mistake to use Internet slang words such as "wat", because it will confuse Internet users such as me. The Computer Hope website notes:

Chat slang is a method of typing long words and phrases as short one-to-four letter words and is also used by people who have difficulties spelling. For example, instead of typing out "are", someone may only type "r." Although chat slang can be easier for you and sometimes faster to type, it makes it difficult to read and most people will ignore you.

(P.S. The mainstream definition of the word wat — "a monastery-temple in Thailand, Cambodia or Laos" — doesn't apply here.)

Answer 3

Gary Bernhardt uses the term "wat" in his talk as though it were synonymous with English exclamations such as "What?!" or "What the hell?", which are common responses to absurd or unexpected stimuli.

However, the misspelling as "wat" is itself intentionally absurd. It derives from the culture of LOLspeak (aka Chanspeak), a culture that satirises the real or imagined psychology of humans and animals by emphasising incomprehension. Bernhardt's exaggerated pronunciation increases the sense of incomprehension he is conveying, adding to the general air of absurdity and making the talk more humorous.

The fundamental point he is getting across is that despite the efforts of the language designers, some of the results programmers encounter in Ruby and JavaScript violate the principle of least astonishment: they are surprising to the programmers, much as seeing an equid, perhaps on a boat, wearing some waterproof clothing and holding a cat, is surprising. Even if the items displayed on the screen are individually recognisable, either the fact that those entities rather than others materialised there, or the way those entities are combined, is unexpected and appears ludicrous. This is true both for the images and for the output from most of the code samples!