2009/1/15 Lennart Augustsson
Why do people think that you should be able to understand everything without ever looking things up?
Understand, no, but "have an intuition about", very definitely yes. In mathematics (and I speak as someone with a mathematical degree, so if I caricature anyone, please excuse it as failing memory rather than intent!!!) there's a tendency to invent terminology, rather than use natural names, because new names don't have unwanted connotations - it's the need for precision driving things. In programming, the need is for *communication* and as such, using words with natural - if imprecise, and occasionally even (slightly) wrong - connotations is extremely helpful.
I'll get back to my example from the comment on the blog post. If I see 'ghee' in a cook book I'll check what it is (if I don't know).
If a significant proportion of words require me to look them up, my flow of understanding is lost and I'll either give up, end up with a muddled impression, or take far longer to understand than the recipe merits (and so, I'll probably not use that cook book again).
I'm not saying Haskell always gets naming right, all I want is to reuse words that exist instead of inventing new ones.
But you seem to be insisting that mathematical terminology is the place to reuse from - whereas, in fact, computing might be a better basis (although computing doesn't insist on the precision that maths needs, so in any "that's not precisely what I mean" argument, non-mathematical terminology starts off an a disadvantage, even though absolute precision may not be the key requirement).
(And 'monoid' is not category theory, it's very basic (abstract) algebra.)
Well, I did a MSc course in mathematics, mostly pure maths including algebra, set theory and similar areas, and I never came across the term. Of course, my degree was 25 years ago, so maybe "monoid" is a term that wasn't invented then ;-))
I don't know any category theory, but if someone tells me that blah is an endomorphism I'm happy to call it that, knowing that I have a name that anyone can figure out with just a little effort.
But unless you invest time researching, you can't draw any conclusions from that. If someone tells you it's a mapping, you can infer that it probably "maps" some things to one another, which gives you a (minimal, imprecise, and possibly wrong in some corner cases, but nevertheless useful) indication of what's going on. Mathematical precision isn't appropriate in all disciplines. Paul.