The Importance of Terminology's Quality

[George Neuner]

On Thu, 08 May 2008 03:25:54 -0700,
usenet1.3.CalRobert at SpamGourmet.Com (Robert Maas,
http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:

>> From: "xah... at gmail.com" <xah... at gmail.com>
>> the importance of naming of functions.
>
>> ... [take] 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.

This is a dumb idea ...

>Better would be to reverse the question: Ask
>random people on the street what they would like to call these
>concepts:

... and this one is even dumber.

Terms don't exist in a vacuum - they exist to facilitate communication
within a particular knowledge or skill domain.  For example, English
is only meaningful to those who speak English.  The opinions of random
people who have no relevant domain knowledge are worthless.

Such a survey could only be meaningful if the survey population
already possessed some knowledge of programming, but were not already
aware of the particular terminology being surveyed.

George
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