You must log in to comment.
in reply to @kukkurovaca's post:
I expect it's constructed by analogy to "consonance – consonant"; "dissonance – dissonant", or something to that effect.
Yeah, I was just wondering if it was, like, coined somewhere and why, or from whence it came into common English usage
Based on what I can see on wiktionary it appears to (in the sense it's used in computer science, in any case) have been introduced by a Romanian computer scientist in the late 70s.
From what I can see, it appears that what happened was that he was writing in English, but reached for a more Romanian construction, and the word spread from there. This is a common thing for multilingual people, and English status as a lingua franca means that a lot of English words happen that way.
Yeah, and it's entirely possible that folks familiar with "performant" in French and familiar with the general pattern of English word forms, would simply assume that it already existed in the English lexicon if they didn't bother to check.