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It's becoming increasingly hard to gather any useful information about software development topic from a concise title because rampant terminology growth and (s

It's becoming increasingly hard to gather any useful information about software development topic from a concise title because rampant terminology growth and (sometimes fueled by reuse of concepts with different terminology in different projects) to the point that concise titles are almost always ambiguous in some manner. For example, I've seen this submission for hours now, and every time I assumed it was sort of function annotation/decorator syntax addition to achieve some interesting result, which didn't pique my interest at those times. Is any other field quite as bad with this as software development seems to be?

oddity 8y ago
This seems to be a particularly extreme case of unconventional terminology usage, but on the whole, the phenomenon you describe is the inevitable consequence of trying to be concise while also not inventing words. The information density of the existing language just can’t handle the depth of all the fields we try to use it for without inventing terminology. Off the top of my head, I would claim that any large subfield of mathematics is probably as bad, if not worse, than software development (see: all the words used to describe “a collection of things”). I would expect this to be true for any sufficiently developed field of study.
oh_sigh 8y ago
The first sentence of the link may be enlightening. Instead of puzzling over it, why not just clicm the link and take a peek? > This document is intended for knowledgeable users of C (or any other language using a C-like grammar, like Perl or Java) who would like to know more about, or make the transition to, C++
- jetzzz 8y ago
  It's not puzzling, it's that you read a title and think it is something different.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Sure, immediately. But OP said "I've seen this submission for hours now", as if he has been trying to decipher it for a long time.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      > But OP said "I've seen this submission for hours now", as if he has been trying to decipher it for a long time. No, seen as in "Seen on the front page but it didn't interest me enough at the time to look into it given what I assumed it was about."

oddity 8y ago

This seems to be a particularly extreme case of unconventional terminology usage, but on the whole, the phenomenon you describe is the inevitable consequence of trying to be concise while also not inventing words. The information density of the existing language just can’t handle the depth of all the fields we try to use it for without inventing terminology. Off the top of my head, I would claim that any large subfield of mathematics is probably as bad, if not worse, than software development (see: all the words used to describe “a collection of things”). I would expect this to be true for any sufficiently developed field of study.

oh_sigh 8y ago

The first sentence of the link may be enlightening. Instead of puzzling over it, why not just clicm the link and take a peek? > This document is intended for knowledgeable users of C (or any other language using a C-like grammar, like Perl or Java) who would like to know more about, or make the transition to, C++

jetzzz 8y ago
It's not puzzling, it's that you read a title and think it is something different.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Sure, immediately. But OP said "I've seen this submission for hours now", as if he has been trying to decipher it for a long time.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    > But OP said "I've seen this submission for hours now", as if he has been trying to decipher it for a long time. No, seen as in "Seen on the front page but it didn't interest me enough at the time to look into it given what I assumed it was about."