This service I’m working on, one of the other things it’s responsible for is sending restart commands to this pool of workers. I named the command “restart”, and one of my co-workers was wondering if it was the same thing as resetting the workers. I was somewhat curious about this confusion. There’s no “reset” command, and I know for myself that if someone came to me to reset something, I’d take it to mean that it should be restored to some previous state. Resetting it to factory settings, for example.
But it got me thinking: are the terms interchangeable? I guess it’s not too ridiculous to think so. After all, PC’s in the ’90s came with “reset” buttons, not “restart” buttons. So it might be a little anachronistic, but do others still use “resetting” to mean restarting something?
So I did the most scientific thing that was within my power to do, and created a Mastodon poll:
When I want to describe turning a computer/device off and on again with a single interaction, I'd say that I want to…
100.0%6 people
And the results are overwealming: 6 out of 6 people who responded use the term “restart” over “reset”, with one additional replier saying that they use the term “reboot”.
So maybe this confusion was just a fluke, or maybe I’m reading too much into this. But it was an interesting train of thought, nonetheless.