footgun

plural footguns

1. derogatoryhumorousslangcomputingAny feature likely to lead to the programmer or user shooting themselves in the foot.

   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.

   2017, Evan Burchard, Refactoring JavaScript: Turning Bad Code Into Good Code, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 262

   2 more 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, […]

   2015, Kyle Simpson, You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN

   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.

   2021, Joseph Edmonds, Lorna Jane Mitchell, The Art of Modern PHP 8, page 295

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.).

present singular third person footguns · participle present footgunning · participle past footgunned · past footgunned

1. idiomaticTo shoot oneself in the foot.