On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 11:07 PM, Clinton Daniel <clinton...@yahoo.com.au>wrote:
> The other side of that coin is burdening users with a bunch of new > terms to learn that don't link to existing human concepts and words. > "Click to save the document" is easier for a new user to grok than > "Flarg to flep the floggle" ;) > > Seriously though, in the space of programming language design, there > is a trade-off in terms of quickly conveying a concept via reusing a > term, versus coining a new term to reduce the impedance mismatch that > occurs when the concept doesn't have exactly the same properties as an > existing term. > Yeah. I've had trouble with this balance before. We need to acknowledge the path dependence in human understanding. My impression: it's connotation, more than denotation, that interferes with human understanding. "Naming is two-way: a strong name changes the meaning of a thing, and a strong thing changes the meaning of a name." - Harrison Ainsworth (@hxa7241) Regards, Dave -- bringing s-words to a pen fight
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