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I’ll drop one of my favorites, from Ken Iverson’s “Notation As A Tool Of Thought”: “The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of
by notduncansmith 9y ago
I’ll drop one of my favorites, from Ken Iverson’s “Notation As A Tool Of Thought”:
“The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.”
http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm
The full paper is wonderful and will make you a better developer.
- platz 9y agoThis one seems odd. Jargon is a barrier, but also an efficiency to the extent is solves a problem.
- dwaltrip 9y agoJargon should be as minimally complex and extensive as needed to express the relevant concepts, given the context. The complexity and amount of jargon is proportional to the difficulty of using that jargon, so overly complicated jargon imposes an unnecessary cost on everyone who encounters it or interacts with it. It sounds like you are saying that jargon is good if it can more effectively express some idea than was possible before. I totally agree with this, it's a great point. But sometimes the additional expressiveness does not compensate enough for the unfamiliarity or peculiarity, making it not worth it, and so it probably won't be adopted by others.