I was watching a video today typecraft, and he used a word “idempotency” that I’ve never heard of before. So I asked what it meant.

Idempotence (UK: /ˌɪdɛmˈpoʊtəns/,[1] US: /ˈaɪdəm-/)[2] is the property of certain operations in mathematics and computer science whereby they can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.

You’d think, with as much as people talk about NixOS and “immutable/automic” distros, I’d have heard of this word before. But this was a first for me. So I learned a new word. Always a good thing. If I were a real programmer, I’d have probably heard of this before, but I’m a pretender of the highest order.