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I remember the english associations of programming words being pretty confusing, to be honest. Generic, for instance, means a standard or non-descript object. A

I remember the english associations of programming words being pretty confusing, to be honest. Generic, for instance, means a standard or non-descript object. Abstract, for another, means something without concrete existence. Static means something that doesn't move, or electrostatic charge. Void is a pretty archaic/unusual word for a space. All these things are a little bit like how they are used in programming languages, but I imagined it would have been easier for me if I'd started out knowing I don't know, rather than trying to figure out how stillness, motion, concrete and abstract, relate to functions. As english, I think programming language mostly comes somewhere between willful butchery and deep elegance. Some words are like a weird riff off newspeak (grep, troff, etc), some words are obvious cultural artefacts of people trying to show how pragmatic and unpretentious they are (Factory, Object, Bash, etc), while others are trying to show some kind of inculcation, like maths terms, or stuff from electronics, but all of it has this great feeling of cultural-technical history. Some are these weird mysteries, like, why did early teletype use allcaps? Isn't lower case more legible? Did the entire early history of programming get written in shouts because the earliest users were military guys that liked shouting?

jacobolus 7y ago
These are all somewhat sloppy versions of the definitions of these words in common use. “Generic”, “general”, “generalize” and “specific”, “special”, “specify”, etc. all come from the relation between “species” and “genus”, where genus is a larger category containing a species. The use of these in a programming context is not too far removed from the same usage in non-technical conversation or in (non-biology) technical contexts like philosophy or mathematics. Similarly for “abstract” (meaning idealized or separated from particular cases) and “concrete”, which have been used in logic/philosophy for a long time. Static means unchanging. Void means “empty”, or in a legal context invalid. > why did early teletype use allcaps Because it replaced humans listening to Morse code, which has no lower case. Also, the first primitive keyboards from the mid 19th century used something like piano keys, which take up a ton of space, and even still up through the 1960s data transmission was expensive so people wanted to save every possible bit. You can read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33, etc.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  >which has no lower case This is exactly what bothers me. Why no lower case? Why not no upper case? You'd need the same number of keys, and it would be more legible. It would use the same amount of space.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    Take it up with Émile Baudot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
    - pasabagi 7y ago
      I feel when something becomes so ubiquitous, even though it's obviously inferior, it takes a bit more push than one patent - especially if the patent is mainly about encoding, and barely incidentally about typography. And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible.
      - jacobolus 7y ago
        The people doing professional book design or handwriting long letters and the people designing systems for transmitting occasional short messages long distances had different priorities. A telegram is a short enough message that being hard to read isn’t really a bottleneck. If it costs a day’s wages to send a couple sentences, the recipient is going to be able to spend a couple minutes on figuring out what it says. People weren’t sending novels around by telegraph.
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        > And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible. As I responded to you elsewhere, the idea that capitals are hard on the eyes is just a myth. All caps with no spaces is bad, but that's because of the missing spaces.
jpindar 7y ago
Capital letters didn't mean shouting until after the internet - or at least texting, BBSs and such - became popular.
- ksaj 7y ago
  I think the same for programming languages. For example, all old LISP programs were capitalized. Nowadays we call it lisp and everything is primarily lowercase (Not Even CamelCase). It's pretty rare to see capitalized lisp code these days. Here's a bit of parody code I wrote on the subject. https://github.com/ksaj/Capitalize.Lisp https://github.com/ksaj/Capitalize.Lisp (protip: It doesn't do anything the comments say it does, even though the results appear to.)
  - walshemj 7y ago
    Older versions of FORTRAN where upper case though you could use Mixed case for Hollerith statements (used for Mixed case output) It was considered a bit flash to use this but for interactive programs input prompts looked a lot nicer.
    - ksaj 7y ago
      I used to program in assembler. You can't imagine the glee that erupted within me the day I discovered you didn't have to write all caps. It changed my coding aesthetics immediately. Nowadays I only use ALLCAPS to visually mark code that I want to refactor, or where later attention is needed, such as for code that might open security vulnerabilities if handled incorrectly.
- fanf2 7y ago
  This article has examples of SHOUTING going back to the 1800s https://meh.com/forum/topics/capital-crimes-part-1--shout-shout-let-it-all-out https://meh.com/forum/topics/capital-crimes-part-1--shout-sh...
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Isn't lower case more legible? No, it isn't.
- furyofantares 7y ago
  Lower-case words have a wider variety of shape, as so many letters have markings extending above and below the horizontal lines that bound the letter o. UPPER-CASE WORDS ARE BASICALLY ALL RECTANGLES OF VARYING WIDTH AND FIXED HEIGHT. BUT THEY USE MUCH LESS WHITESPACE, WHICH IS WHAT LOWER-CASE WORDS USE TO CARVE OUT SHAPE. I believe the result is that lower-case words are easier to read at sufficiently close distance but legibility drops off sooner as distance increases. I also believe that while upper-case words may be less legible, individual letters are more legible as upper-case, and therefore upper-case words may be easier for very inexperienced readers who haven’t learned words by shape and still piece them together by letter.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Word shape is not a well-supported theory of reading. Very skilled and practiced readers are still going letter by letter. "The result" is that if you pull people off the street and ask them to read capitalized or lower-case text, they're slower at reading the capitalized text. People like pasabagi want to leap to the conclusion that that means reading capitalized text is harder. That conclusion is unjustified; the rest of the result is that the difference in reading speed disappears after a small amount of practice. Lowercase text is more common. But obviously that can't justify the choice of a writing system; any writing system will be common if it's in common use.
    - pasabagi 7y ago
      Your ideas seem a bit counter-intuitive, so I'll assume they're coming from some literature, and I guess I can't really comment on literature I haven't read. All the stuff I've found (partially what motivated my interest in the first place) were studies showing the opposite, written in the days when ALLCAPS was the normal form of written communication.
    - 7y ago

jacobolus 7y ago

These are all somewhat sloppy versions of the definitions of these words in common use. “Generic”, “general”, “generalize” and “specific”, “special”, “specify”, etc. all come from the relation between “species” and “genus”, where genus is a larger category containing a species. The use of these in a programming context is not too far removed from the same usage in non-technical conversation or in (non-biology) technical contexts like philosophy or mathematics. Similarly for “abstract” (meaning idealized or separated from particular cases) and “concrete”, which have been used in logic/philosophy for a long time. Static means unchanging. Void means “empty”, or in a legal context invalid. > why did early teletype use allcaps Because it replaced humans listening to Morse code, which has no lower case. Also, the first primitive keyboards from the mid 19th century used something like piano keys, which take up a ton of space, and even still up through the 1960s data transmission was expensive so people wanted to save every possible bit. You can read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33, etc.

pasabagi 7y ago
>which has no lower case This is exactly what bothers me. Why no lower case? Why not no upper case? You'd need the same number of keys, and it would be more legible. It would use the same amount of space.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  Take it up with Émile Baudot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    I feel when something becomes so ubiquitous, even though it's obviously inferior, it takes a bit more push than one patent - especially if the patent is mainly about encoding, and barely incidentally about typography. And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible.
    - jacobolus 7y ago
      The people doing professional book design or handwriting long letters and the people designing systems for transmitting occasional short messages long distances had different priorities. A telegram is a short enough message that being hard to read isn’t really a bottleneck. If it costs a day’s wages to send a couple sentences, the recipient is going to be able to spend a couple minutes on figuring out what it says. People weren’t sending novels around by telegraph.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > And I don't think it's the case that nobody knew capitals were hard on the eyes. The whole reason why lower case letters exist is because roman allcapswithnospaces are horrible. As I responded to you elsewhere, the idea that capitals are hard on the eyes is just a myth. All caps with no spaces is bad, but that's because of the missing spaces.

jpindar 7y ago

Capital letters didn't mean shouting until after the internet - or at least texting, BBSs and such - became popular.

ksaj 7y ago
I think the same for programming languages. For example, all old LISP programs were capitalized. Nowadays we call it lisp and everything is primarily lowercase (Not Even CamelCase). It's pretty rare to see capitalized lisp code these days. Here's a bit of parody code I wrote on the subject. https://github.com/ksaj/Capitalize.Lisp https://github.com/ksaj/Capitalize.Lisp (protip: It doesn't do anything the comments say it does, even though the results appear to.)
- walshemj 7y ago
  Older versions of FORTRAN where upper case though you could use Mixed case for Hollerith statements (used for Mixed case output) It was considered a bit flash to use this but for interactive programs input prompts looked a lot nicer.
  - ksaj 7y ago
    I used to program in assembler. You can't imagine the glee that erupted within me the day I discovered you didn't have to write all caps. It changed my coding aesthetics immediately. Nowadays I only use ALLCAPS to visually mark code that I want to refactor, or where later attention is needed, such as for code that might open security vulnerabilities if handled incorrectly.
fanf2 7y ago
This article has examples of SHOUTING going back to the 1800s https://meh.com/forum/topics/capital-crimes-part-1--shout-shout-let-it-all-out https://meh.com/forum/topics/capital-crimes-part-1--shout-sh...

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> Isn't lower case more legible? No, it isn't.

furyofantares 7y ago
Lower-case words have a wider variety of shape, as so many letters have markings extending above and below the horizontal lines that bound the letter o. UPPER-CASE WORDS ARE BASICALLY ALL RECTANGLES OF VARYING WIDTH AND FIXED HEIGHT. BUT THEY USE MUCH LESS WHITESPACE, WHICH IS WHAT LOWER-CASE WORDS USE TO CARVE OUT SHAPE. I believe the result is that lower-case words are easier to read at sufficiently close distance but legibility drops off sooner as distance increases. I also believe that while upper-case words may be less legible, individual letters are more legible as upper-case, and therefore upper-case words may be easier for very inexperienced readers who haven’t learned words by shape and still piece them together by letter.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  Word shape is not a well-supported theory of reading. Very skilled and practiced readers are still going letter by letter. "The result" is that if you pull people off the street and ask them to read capitalized or lower-case text, they're slower at reading the capitalized text. People like pasabagi want to leap to the conclusion that that means reading capitalized text is harder. That conclusion is unjustified; the rest of the result is that the difference in reading speed disappears after a small amount of practice. Lowercase text is more common. But obviously that can't justify the choice of a writing system; any writing system will be common if it's in common use.
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    Your ideas seem a bit counter-intuitive, so I'll assume they're coming from some literature, and I guess I can't really comment on literature I haven't read. All the stuff I've found (partially what motivated my interest in the first place) were studies showing the opposite, written in the days when ALLCAPS was the normal form of written communication.
  - 7y ago