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In the course of writing a programming book I've come to learn something surprising (for me anyway). People can be very touchy when you assume that they know t
by fogus 16y ago
In the course of writing a programming book I've come to learn something surprising (for me anyway). People can be very touchy when you assume that they know the meanings of certain programming topics. Among those that I've found to be particularly hurtful are: monad, combinator, closure, functional, immutable, higher-order, Haskell, big-O, and macro.
- raganwald 16y ago+1. And I think that's related to the emotional baggage around blog posts titled "Why _____ is an excellent|terrible interview question|exercise." Jargon and slang have a useful ability to compress information, but they also carry tribal connotations. "Raganwald is a NOOP," for example, is simultaneously an insult and an opportunity to reinforce a tribal bond between speaker and listener, who both share a certain understanding of the term "NOOP."
- j_baker 16y agoThe worst of all is "persistent" as in "persistent data structure"[1]. This ignites tempers like none other. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure
- fogus 16y agoYes persistent is a doozy, as is lambda -- the ultimate antagonizer.