On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Sittampalam, Ganesh
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
I have replied on his blog, but I'll repeat the gist of it here. Why is there a fear of using existing terminology that is exact? Why do people want to invent new words when there are already existing ones with the exact meaning that you want? If I see Monoid I know what it is, if I didn't know I could just look on Wikipedia. If I see Appendable I can guess what it might be, but exactly what does it mean?
I would suggest that having to look things up slows people down and might distract them from learning other, perhaps more useful, things about the language.
Exactly. For example, the entry for monoid on Wikipedia starts: "In abstract algebra, a branch of mathematics, a monoid is an algebraic structure with a single, associative binary operation and an identity element." I've had some set theory, but most programmers I know have not.