Re: [Haskell-cafe] off-topic question: how well do you think linguistic relativity applies to PLs and programming?

Mikael Brockman writes:

So just introducing a name (or even an ISBN number) isn't enough to establish an abstraction in the humanities -- you need to work for it, and new abstractions will probably remain fringey and unloved for a few years until they're accepted as part of normal discourse.

There are similar issues in programming, like when introducing brand new abstract typeclasses, combinators, concepts, and so on. Even introducing a dependency on a 3rd party library can sometimes resemble a kind of "namedropping." But it's easier to get away with it in software!

Right, that's what I was talking about. Actually, not only is it easier to get away with it in software, it's the preferred option -- DRY is good and NIH is bad, etc. -Keshav