Garbage collection is the automatic process of freeing up memory that is no longer being used by a program, so developers can focus on writing code instead of manually managing memory. It's like having a robot maid clean up your mess while you're busy hacking away on your latest project.

How to use it in a sentence

• "I don't waste time deallocating memory like some sort of primitive caveman programmer. I let garbage collection handle that so I can focus on writing elegant, artisanal, locally-sourced code."

• "Sure, you could spend hours hunting down every last memory leak, or you could just let garbage collection do its thing and spend that time arguing about tabs vs. spaces on Twitter like a real 10X developer."

If you actually want to learn more...

• Paul Graham provides a concise explanation of garbage collection in Lisp, one of the earliest languages to adopt this technique, in his article "Revenge of the Nerds".

• For a deep dive into garbage collection algorithms and their implementations in various languages, check out "Garbage Collection" by Richard Jones and Rafael Lins.

• Martin Fowler discusses the impact of garbage collection on application performance and how to optimize it in his article "Garbage Collection Tuning".

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