Clarity vs. code reuse/generality

[Simon Forman]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Jean-Michel
Pichavant<jeanmichel at sequans.com> wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:13:28 +0000, Lie Ryan wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> When people are fighting over things like `sense`, although sense may
>>> not be strictly wrong dictionary-wise, it smells of something burning...
>>>
>>
>> That would be my patience.
>>
>> I can't believe the direction this discussion has taken. Anybody sensible
>> would be saying "Oh wow, I've just learned a new meaning to the word, that's
>> great, I'm now less ignorant than I was a minute ago". But oh no, we mustn't
>> use a standard meaning to a word, heaven forbid we disturb people's
>> ignorance by teaching them something new.
>>
>> It's as simple as this: using `sense` as a variable name to record the
>> sense of a function is not a code smell, any more than using `flag` to
>> record a flag would be, or `sign` to record the sign of an object. If you
>> don't know the appropriate meanings of the words sense, flag or sign, learn
>> them, don't dumb down my language.
>>
>>
>
> Can't we just calm down ? I'm really sorry my ignorance started this thread,
> and my apologies go to Kj who's obviously more fluent in english than me.
> I've never used sense in that way before, nor I've seen used by others until
> now. However Kj is right, and my dictionary seems wrong (wordreference.com).
> I've searched through others dictionaries and find out this is actually
> applicable to functions. My bad.
>
> JM

Well met, sir.