4 ms·

Yep. "Orthogonal" is one of my favorites. Along with "order of magnitude".

• sincerely 9y ago
  “order of magnitude” is a pretty useful concept, to be fair.
  • combatentropy 9y ago
    But it's twice as long as saying "ten times." "The server is an order of magnitude faster than our old one." "The server is 10 times faster than our old one." -- More often heard: "The server is an order of magnitude more performant than our legacy server."
• milesvp 9y ago
  Yeah, except orthogonal has a very precise meaning in mathematics, there is no other word that can be used to replace it when describing a multidimensional vector that is perpendicular to every other vector. This is a very important feature in that it means the vector can be modified and it won't impact any other vectors. You probably hear it a lot, because it's generally important to make functions orthogonal with respect to each other so they may be modified without effecting one another. I'll agree that order of magnitude is starting to feel like it's overused as rhetoric in programming circles, even though it too is a very important concept in engineering.