On Aug 1, 2012, at 3:44 PM, Brendan Eich wrote:
>> One possibility is : moniker
While I recognize the benefit of staking out new territory, I think that misses
the opportunity to build off of existing intuitions. I tend to think it's ok to
use a term from another language that isn't 100% isomorphic, as long as a) the
analogy helps people bootstrap their understanding, b) the core intuition
suggested by the name is good, and c) the differences aren't likely to trip
people up.
>> Consider:
>> "A property key is either a string or a moniker"
>
> I agree that "Name" here is confusing when one reads aloud, because the
> capital N and code font are not voiced. However in print, Name can work as
> well as Symbol or other terms.
I'm partial to Symbol. It doesn't smell like a thesaurus was involved, and it's
a decent intuition. In the Lisp world, strings and symbols are isomorphic, but
there's a sense that symbols have identity where strings don't. Now, Lisp
symbols are historically forgeable and interned, so this isn't exactly the same
concept. But you can still ride on the intuition that "symbols are like strings
but they have identity / cheap comparison". And it feels like a smaller delta
to the language to say:
"A property key is either a string or a symbol"
rather than
"A property key is either a string or a new-thing-you-haven't-heard-of"
(YMMV)
> It would be awkward to have only compound names such as UniqueName and
> PrivateName.
Yes, compound names feel like we're giving up. :) And I'd really rather unify
unique/private into a single datatype with a privacy flag, rather than two
separate datatypes.
> Hacker jargon such as a nouned "gensym" would be as distinctive, if not
> moreso, and better yet, well-employed compared to "moniker".
I could live with nouning gensym, even though some people are allergic to
nouning/verbing. Then again, new Gensym does smack of the Kingdom of Nouns --
verbing a nouning of a verb, oh my! Or we could simply have a gensym() function
-- uncapitalized -- and refer to the result as "a gensym." That's just a single
nouning.
In a vacuum, I like the idea of "key" but that's obviously far too generic, and
the term is already used by Object.keys(). I tried thesaurusing it but nothing
jumped out at me.
Dave
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