What does Noop mean? What is a Noop?

Noop is an abbreviation of “no operation”. Sometimes pronounced “newp” and also “noh-ahp”, noop was first used as a machine language instruction, usually abbreviated “NOP”. The NOP instruction tells a computer to do nothing. The purpose of a NOP varies from system to system, sometimes used as a reset mechanism and other times a placeholder. Regardless of a noop’s purpose, it’s use is intended to represent a logical do-no-thing — as such noops don’t interfere with the rest of a program’s logic (though they might change how a physical machine processes that logic). Noops happen and they do nothing.

Eventually, the concept was appropriated to refer to the “operations” of running software — keeping software functioning properly in deployed environments. In 2011, the term NoOps was coined by consulting company, Forrester. Forrester used the term NoOps, pronounced noh-ahps, to describe the aspirational goal of automating an organization’s entire software operation efforts — reducing the operational effort to nothing — NoOps.

Our company, Noop, draws on both histories. We chose the name Noop because we believe aspiring to “no operations” is a worthy and attainable goal. Achieving no-operations requires new software development primitives to express how applications should run. the Noop Developer Platform understands these primitives and uses their instruction to run your applications. Without the overhead of operations you are free to develop what is special about your software. Our goal is to make expressing how your software runs as easy as writing a noop.

Specific Noop Definitions and Implementations

In case you’re looking for another Noop, here is an index of Noop resources and links:

Other Noops

• Noops in Javascript
• For a list of architectures with NOP instruction codes see the table on the NOP Wikipedia entry.
• Google employees once explored developing a language called Noop, the project has since been abandoned.
• For other disambiguation, see the Wikipedia entry