Reminded me of Control Systems classes back in my EE days. Just in case anyone else wants to nerd it up, here's the nostalgia-induced Wikipedia rabbit hole I went down:
Right now I'm fixing some accessibility issues involving some code where people on my team (including myself) have been making changes to the code without a complete understanding of how things are supposed to work.
I don't want to keep pushing a bubble around under the rug so I've done some small refactorings (extract a chunk of <svg> into <SvgLogo>) and I'm now writing a huge comment that explains the status quo. I'm sure there are going to be some more refactorings in the same code and I expect to change the comment accordingly.
Frequently comments are apologies and are in themselves a bad smell.
An oscillation is a projection of a circular motion to a lower dimensional space. The delay is called phase lag. If the phase lag is pi/2, then it is also called derivative where one quantity measures the rate of change in the other. The quantities are running around in a circle with a phase lag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping#Oscillation_cases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(signal)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_(engineering)