The Importance of Terminology's Quality

[xahlee at gmail.com]

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
  xah at xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/

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