> "It is intuitive" has no other discernable meaning than "*I* am familiar > with it, or something very much like it." >
Thanks for pointing this out, I was not able to point my thoughts in this direction. But I still have a doubt: if my familiarity doesn't come in the form of some "analogy", then my acquired intuition about "it" would be of little use. In fact, it may well be misleading. Am I correct? If so, the best we can hope is the name-giver to describe, as explicitly as possible, the "analogy" (sort of a thought process) he/she had had in his/her mind while giving a particular name to a given concept? It will help others to share *at least some amount of* of intuition (analogy) the originator had had. Are such thoughts documented in this case? Thanks and regards, -Damodar Kulkarni On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 11:37 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe <o...@cs.otago.ac.nz>wrote: > > On 7/08/2013, at 2:10 PM, damodar kulkarni wrote: > > > I bet you can find an abundance of C programmers who think that > > "strcmp" is an intuitive name for string comparison (rather than > compression, say). > > > > But at least, 'strcmp' is not a common English language term, to have > acquired some unintentional 'intuition' by being familiar with it even in > our daily life. The Haskell terms, say, 'return' and 'lift', on the other > hand, do have usage in common English, so even a person with _no_ > programming background would have acquired some unintentional 'intuition' > by being familiar with them. > > "Lift" is - a brand of soft drink, the thing Americans call an elevator, > a thing put in your shoes seem taller, and a free ride, amongst other > things. > As a verb, it can mean to kick something. > > To find "lift" intuitive, you have to be familiar with the *mathematical* > idiom of "lifting" a value from one space to another via some sort of > injection. Fair enough, but this *still* counts as an example of > "intuitive = familiar", because this is *not* a sense of "lift" that is > familiar to undergraduate and masters computing students unless they have > taken rather more mathematics papers than most of them have. > > If you're familiar with *English* rather than, say, the C family of > programming languages, "return" isn't _that_ bad, there is certainly > nothing about the word that suggests providing a value. I once tried > to propose a C-style 'return' statement to some people who were > designing a programming language, before I or they had ever heard of > C, and they flatly rejected it. Months later I found out that this > was because they were looking for something that did not just resume > the caller but also provided a value, and when I protested that that's > exactly what 'return' did in the languages I proposed stealing from, > they -- being familiar with Fortran -- said that it had never occurred > to them that 'return' could have anything to with providing a value. > > "It is intuitive" has no other discernable meaning than "*I* am familiar > with it, > or something very much like it." > > _That's_ the point I want to make. *Whatever* anyone uses for Haskell's > "return", many people are bound to find it unintuitive. Choose a name > on any grounds but that. > > >
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