Foundations Glossary

Browse 8 foundations terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

8 Foundations Terms

Church-Turing Thesis: The hypothesis that any function computable by an effective procedure can be computed by a Turing machine. Equivalently, lambda calculus, Turing machines, and...
CNCF: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which hosts and stewards many major open-source infrastructure projects. In cloud-native culture, CNCF functions as both...
Core: The central or most essential part of a codebase, library, service, or processor around which other pieces are built. Calling something core usually means it...
Cryptographic Primitive: Cryptographic Primitive is a low-level building block such as a cipher, hash, MAC, or signature algorithm used inside larger protocols. Security teams use it...
Eclipse Foundation: A nonprofit foundation that hosts and governs many open source projects, originally centered on the Eclipse IDE ecosystem but now spanning cloud, IoT, tooling,...
Lambda Calculus: Lambda Calculus is a formal mathematical system for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application, developed by Alonzo Church in the...
Linux Foundation: A nonprofit consortium that supports Linux and many related open source projects through governance, events, legal infrastructure, and ecosystem coordination....
Technical Steering Committee: A formal governing body in a project or foundation that makes or approves technical direction decisions, often abbreviated TSC. It is commonly used in larger...