Naming poses no problem so long as you define things a bit. :P

Humans parsing documents without proper definitions are like coders trying to 
read programming languages that have no comments

(pretty much all the source code I ever read unfortunately)

J


On 08/05/2012, at 4:36 PM, David Barbour wrote:

> On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 11:07 PM, Clinton Daniel <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> The other side of that coin is burdening users with a bunch of new
> terms to learn that don't link to existing human concepts and words.
> "Click to save the document" is easier for a new user to grok than
> "Flarg to flep the floggle" ;)
> 
> Seriously though, in the space of programming language design, there
> is a trade-off in terms of quickly conveying a concept via reusing a
> term, versus coining a new term to reduce the impedance mismatch that
> occurs when the concept doesn't have exactly the same properties as an
> existing term.
> 
> Yeah. I've had trouble with this balance before. We need to acknowledge the 
> path dependence in human understanding.
> 
> My impression: it's connotation, more than denotation, that interferes with 
> human understanding. 
> 
> "Naming is two-way: a strong name changes the meaning of a thing, and a 
> strong thing changes the meaning of a name." - Harrison Ainsworth (@hxa7241)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Dave
> 
> -- 
> bringing s-words to a pen fight
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