I'd like to introduce a blog post by Stephen Wolfram, on the design process of Mathematica. In particular, he touches on the importance of naming of functions.
• Ten Thousand Hours of Design Reviews (2008 Jan 10) by Stephen Wolfram http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/01/10/ten-thousand-hours-of-design-reviews/ The issue is fitting here today, in our discussion of “closure” terminology recently, as well the jargons “lisp 1 vs lisp2” (multi- meaning space vs single-meaning space), “tail recursion”, “currying”, “lambda”, that perennially crop up here and elsewhere in computer language forums in wild misunderstanding and brouhaha. The functions in Mathematica, are usually very well-name, in contrast to most other computing languages. In particular, the naming in Mathematica, as Stephen Wolfram implied in his blog above, takes the perspective of naming by capturing the essense, or mathematical essence, of the keyword in question. (as opposed to, naming it according to convention, which often came from historical happenings) When a thing is well-named from the perspective of what it actually “mathematically” is, as opposed to historical developments, it avoids vast amount of potential confusion. Let me give a few example. • “lambda”, widely used as a keyword in functional languages, is named just “Function” in Mathematica. The “lambda” happend to be called so in the field of symbolic logic, is due to use of the greek letter lambda “λ” by happenstance. The word does not convey what it means. While, the name “Function”, stands for the mathematical concept of “function” as is. • Module, Block, in Mathematica is in lisp's various “let*”. The lisp's keywords “let”, is based on the English word “let”. That word is one of the English word with multitudes of meanings. If you look up its definition in a dictionary, you'll see that it means many disparate things. One of them, as in “let's go”, has the meaning of “permit; to cause to; allow”. This meaning is rather vague from a mathematical sense. Mathematica's choice of Module, Block, is based on the idea that it builds a self-contained segment of code. (however, the choice of Block as keyword here isn't perfect, since the word also has meanings like “obstruct; jam”) • Functions that takes elements out of list are variously named First, Rest, Last, Extract, Part, Take, Select, Cases, DeleteCases... as opposed to “car”, “cdr”, “filter”, “filter”, “pop”, “shift”, “unshift”, in lisps and perl and other langs. The above are some examples. The thing to note is that, Mathematica's choices are often such that the word stands for the meaning themselves in some logical and independent way as much as possible, without having dependent on a particular computer science field's context or history. One easy way to confirm this, is taking a keyword and ask a wide audience, who doesn't know about the language or even unfamiliar of computer programing, to guess what it means. The wide audience can be made up of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, programers, laymen. This general audience, are more likely to guess correctly what Mathematica's keyword is meant in the language, than the the name used in other computer languages who's naming choices goes by convention or context. (for example, Perl's naming heavily relies on unix culture (grep, pipe, hash...), while functional lang's namings are typically heavily based on the field of mathematical logic (e.g. lambda, currying, closure, monad, ...). Lisp's cons, car, cdr, are based on computer hardware (this particular naming, caused a major damage to the lisp language to this day). (Other examples: pop, shift are based on computer science jargon of “stack”. Grep is from Global Regular Expression Print, while Regular Expression is from theoretical computer science of Automata... The name regex has done major hidden damage to the computing industry, in the sense that if it have just called it “string patterns”, then a lot explanations, literatures, confusions, would have been avoided.)) (Note: Keywords or functions in Mathematica are not necessarily always best named. Nor are there always one absolute choice as best, as there are many other considerations, such as the force of wide existing convention, the context where the function are used, brevity, limitations of English language, different scientific context (e.g. math, physics, engineering), or even human preferences.) ---------------------------- Many of the issues regarding the importance and effects of terminology's quality, i've wrote about since about 2000. Here are the relevant essays: • Jargons of Info Tech Industry http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/jargons.html • The Jargon “Lisp1” vs “Lisp2” http://xahlee.org/emacs/lisp1_vs_lisp2.html • The Term Curring In Computer Science http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/currying.html • What Is Closure In A Programing Language http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/closure.html • What are OOP's Jargons and Complexities http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/t2/oop.html • Sun Microsystem's abuse of term “API” and “Interface” http://xahlee.org/java-a-day/interface.html • Math Terminology and Naming of Things http://xahlee.org/cmaci/notation/math_namings.html Xah [EMAIL PROTECTED] ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list