I have held a mistaken belief about what "orthogonal" means. I
thought it meant something like being on the same plane, but being not
related. Like size-of-biceps and computer savviness. But according
to m-w.com and Google's define feature, orthogonal implies a definite
relationship.
m-w.com:
1 a : intersecting or lying at right angles b : having perpendicular
slopes or tangents at the point of intersection <orthogonal curves>
2 : having a sum of products or an integral that is zero or sometimes
one under specified conditions: as a of real-valued functions : having
the integral of the product of each pair of functions over a specific
interval equal to zero b of vectors : having the scalar product equal
to zero c of a square matrix : having the sum of products of
corresponding elements in any two rows or any two columns equal to one
if the rows or columns are the same and equal to zero otherwise :
having a transpose with which the product equals the identity matrix
The closest it comes to my previous understanding is:
5 : statistically independent
This number five is probably key to the way I hear computer people
using the word, but it's still not quite in line.
Here are a few quotes from the list that demonstrate its use, with
signature lines for attribution.
"However, some people actually want multiple character sets to render
and maybe even do so in a proportional way while conforming to the
user setting rather than having a completely orthogonal set of emacs
settings that everybody will complain about having to set."
-a
"SCons somewhat compliments [the Eggs/setuptools project] but is more
or less orthogonal."
-Jon
"The generation of publications might be considered a different
dimension of the overall system -- more-or-less orthogonal, I suppose
you might say."
..jim
"[C++'s Standard Template Library] is orthogonal to OOP. Bad OO is
not limited to C++. It has only been in the past 5 years that people
have figured out that deep inheritance *in any language* is bad."
-a
-todd
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