Todd Walton wrote:
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
Wikipedia has a nice discussion about the various uses of "orthogonal".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonality
I tend to use it in the sense of "a and b are two characteristics,
variables, methods, etc. which comprise a larger space of many
variables, methods, etc. If a change in a causes no change in b, they
are orthogonal."
I will also use the word "independent". In your first quote, I probably
should have used "independent". In the second quote, my choice of
orthogonal was intentional. In my head, design techniques can be
thought of as comprising a vector space. Some of the vectors clearly
are interrelated. Procedural and OO programming have some (unspecified)
relationship and are not orthogonal. Template programming and OO
programming, however, have vectors that you can adjust completely
independently of one another; therefore, I call them orthogonal.
-a
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