Replace fancy-pants terminology

[jducoeur]

Engineers -- especially those who are on the edges of functional programming -- may appreciate this posting from Guy Steele. In it, he argues that the functional-programming community has picked up a lot of jargon from the math world like "associative", "commutative" and "identity", but while those concepts are ferociously important, the terminology mostly just gets in the way of the average programmer.

While I don't love his specific strawman proposals (eg, replace "Commutative" with "OrderDoesn'tMatter"), I think he's basically onto something here. Spelling out what these concepts *mean* in practice a little more clearly (and his table of examples is wonderfully clear) would probably lower a major barrier to entry into functional programming...

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

No fair.

He used words of more than one syllable. :-)

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

As someone who spends his days bringing definitions of "associative" and "commutative" down to a third-grade level of understanding, I smile at the thought that sort of fancy-pants terminology is too obscure for the average programmer. But providing practical examples is certainly a good and helpful thing.