On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Ethan Anderes <[email protected]>wrote:
> yeah, I can imagine how annoying it is to the developers that all us > newbies feel like we can chime in on language design:) However, I do think > its a sign of how natural and inclusive the language feels to the everyday > user. > > BTW: I like maxof better than pmax, but maybe like .max() better than > either ;) > Not at all – I think it's great to have lots of input on these kinds of decisions – we all have to live with the language. But at some point you just need to make a decision and stick with it. We had an epic bikeshed<https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/4235> and you'll note that my position did not win out. The most popular option that won out was max, as in "the max of a and b", and maximum, as in "the maximum of this vector". While you can say "the maximum of a and b" as well as "the max of this vector", I do think there's a pretty clear linguistic indication that max is a choice between two things while the maximum is the largest value in a collection. It's a subtle linguistic difference, but I do think it's there.
