I've just read the O'Reilly book Getting Started with Storm and encoutered the word randomically. I highly suspect this is a made up word, but a quick google found it in use here, here, and here. Is this some obscure technical term perhaps? Or is it a case of a covergent devolution of English?
I don’t think this is a misspelling, as they (authors of the book) use the word randomly in a previous sentence (emphasis mine):
Shuffle Grouping is the most commonly used grouping. It takes a single parameter (the
source component) and sends each tuple emitted by the source to a randomly chosen
bolt warranting that each consumer will receive the same number of tuples.The shuffle grouping is useful for doing atomic operations such as a math operation.
However, if the operation can’t be randomically distributed, such as the example in
Chapter 2 where you needed to count words, you should consider the use of other
grouping.
Did they intend it to mean something else? If so, what is that other meaning?
Best Answer
Where the authors of the book wrote randomically, they meant randomly and in fact intended to write randomly. This is demonstrably true.
Randomically is not a word known to specialists and having a technical meaning (even an obscure one), because nobody is using it in published works – it is not found anywhere in the Google Books corpus (see: Google Ngram Viewer), nor has any lexicographer discovered the word and included it in a dictionary (see: OneLook).
It is not a term coined by the authors of the book, or they would have defined it.
The one place where it is used in the book (in Chapter 3 – see the excerpt in the question) refers to an example in Chapter 2, but there the example is described “in randomly distributed fashion”.
Jonathan Leibiusky (co-author) and one of the editors at O’Reilly have just sent me a nice thank-you note for reporting the error.