Today's dilemma: PyCharm hints unregister as a typo

 

OK, so of course since it's a completely irrelevant one, I dug into the problem relatively heavily ... cause what else would you do? :D

And here's one debate (2011) with a lot of interesting comments:

meaning - "Unregister" vs "Deregister" - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

One pulls some good logic in:

it's convention in programming to call an object that hasn't been 'initialised' as 'uninitialised', not 'deinitialised'.

And since what's deregistered has already been registered, it wouldn't be in the same shoes as those things which never had been registered, and would thus be called unregistered.

But then there's some properly defying statistic there ...!

As evidenced, unregister received a substantial boost shortly after the dot-com boom/bust of the late 90s, while deregister usage has been more or less the same throughout. [...] Additionally, both the un- and de- prefixes can be defined as a reversal of action. Despite the similarities, I'd go with popular usage and use unregister.

I really like that approach in a way. Quantified. Cold, hard facts in this very emotional problem that gets so many carried away. Numbers do tell a lot. Personally, I always 'knew' unregister to be The Word, but as I noticed due to the PyCharm editor hint, I could have equally naturally said deregister right now (outside the context)... so let's move over this bad infection.

Let's get up to date and context specific:

Final word: GitHub says ... yes!

Search · unregister · GitHub vs. Search · deregister · GitHub!

n	Unregister 👍	Deregister 👎
Repos	196	95
Commits	10M+	1.8M+

 

Without looking at the further candidate metrics, I think there's a clear winner here. And that is, the procrastination of actual work ;)