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> Why is it a bad idea to call my jQuery plugin "jQuery Combinators," and why are K and T such terrible names for its methods? simple answer: marketing. you h

by noodle 16y ago

> Why is it a bad idea to call my jQuery plugin "jQuery Combinators," and why are K and T such terrible names for its methods? simple answer: marketing. you have a nice plugin there. if you want more people to find it and use it, using terminology that discriminates instead of includes will make that more difficult. if you don't, then it doesn't matter and you can do whatever you want.

raganwald 16y ago
+1. although it's kind of sad that there is this rich trove of knowledge about computer science that has somehow become "discriminatory" instead of "lingua franca." It seems to parallel the disdain some elements of society have for science in general. I will probably rename everything at some point and use it to try to lure people into finding out more about combinators. Perhaps "Ruby Shoes for jQuery" could be the gateway drug for combinatory logic... But somehow I'm still saddened to think that we could look at something, know it has a name, but fear that calling it by its name will make it less popular than if we try to find a catchy nickname for it. Should professors rename the combinators "returning" and "into?"
- noodle 16y ago
  i think you're confusing "lingua franca" with "jargon". you're using jargon now, and should translate it into lingua franca for the non-CS trained jquery users. and that is just how it goes with the popularization with any field. the masses will have their own way of talking about concepts that differs from the educated academics. and there's a growing group of non-CS educated web developers/designers that make use of jquery in meaningful ways.
- chc 16y ago
  It's not the knowledge that's discriminatory — it's the odd, non-descriptive names. Honestly, is there anything about the K-combinator that would naturally make you think "Hey, that's a K" if you only knew how it was used and didn't know its name? The name is not the thing. This isn't about a distain for science or knowledge. It's about disdain for oblique names. I mean, heck, we would blast anyone who named all their variables that way. Imagine if Ruby's "each," "map" and "select" methods were instead named "w", "q" and "x" — you would rightly say that Matz had gone mad. We tolerate it in our combinators because that's just how it's always been done, but that doesn't mean other people are wrong to be put off by it.

by noodle 16y ago

raganwald 16y ago

+1. although it's kind of sad that there is this rich trove of knowledge about computer science that has somehow become "discriminatory" instead of "lingua franca." It seems to parallel the disdain some elements of society have for science in general. I will probably rename everything at some point and use it to try to lure people into finding out more about combinators. Perhaps "Ruby Shoes for jQuery" could be the gateway drug for combinatory logic... But somehow I'm still saddened to think that we could look at something, know it has a name, but fear that calling it by its name will make it less popular than if we try to find a catchy nickname for it. Should professors rename the combinators "returning" and "into?"

noodle 16y ago
i think you're confusing "lingua franca" with "jargon". you're using jargon now, and should translate it into lingua franca for the non-CS trained jquery users. and that is just how it goes with the popularization with any field. the masses will have their own way of talking about concepts that differs from the educated academics. and there's a growing group of non-CS educated web developers/designers that make use of jquery in meaningful ways.
chc 16y ago
It's not the knowledge that's discriminatory — it's the odd, non-descriptive names. Honestly, is there anything about the K-combinator that would naturally make you think "Hey, that's a K" if you only knew how it was used and didn't know its name? The name is not the thing. This isn't about a distain for science or knowledge. It's about disdain for oblique names. I mean, heck, we would blast anyone who named all their variables that way. Imagine if Ruby's "each," "map" and "select" methods were instead named "w", "q" and "x" — you would rightly say that Matz had gone mad. We tolerate it in our combinators because that's just how it's always been done, but that doesn't mean other people are wrong to be put off by it.