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Actually, I thought the cattle analogy missed the point - surely the reason we don't give names to each of our 10,000 cattle is that we don't care which one is
by danparsonson 17y ago
Actually, I thought the cattle analogy missed the point - surely the reason we don't give names to each of our 10,000 cattle is that we don't care which one is which? I don't find that to be true of data. Also, file names are often used to describe the data to which they relate; in that sense, we actually do give names to each of our 10,000 cattle - we call them 'cows' - it just happens that we use the same name for each individual because they are identical at the abstraction level we care about.
Or maybe it's me who missed the point? :-)
- ThomPete 17y agoactually it's not true of cattle either. We care about the individual cattle when we process it. I.e. when it goes to the slaughterhouse we want to make sure it's not contagious, that it's not a kid cattle etc. We might even group them males or females. The answer is context not categorization.
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoProcessing cattle is a kind of filter/map operation: walk the list of cows, assessing each one on a set of criteria, and then processing the cows that meet the criteria.