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I completely agree with your take on this. If you know what a "map" is in the CS context, "mappable" makes perfect sense. Names are absolutely critical to the s

I completely agree with your take on this. If you know what a "map" is in the CS context, "mappable" makes perfect sense. Names are absolutely critical to the synthesis of knowledge, as they provide a simple symbol by which to refer to complex concepts, which gives you greater power in wielding those concepts. --- Whenever the topic of names comes up, I reread one of my favorite blog posts I've ever come across: "What's in a Name" by Olin Shivers [0]. Here's the thesis statement: > [My thesis advisor, Allen] Newell [...] explained his understanding of names: “They provide distal access.” That is, a name is a local piece of data that stands for some other piece of data, which is presumably large and remote. You can now use that small, convenient, local datum instead of the large, remote thing for which it stands. (If, like me prior to reading this, you're unfamiliar with the word "distal", it means "Remote from the point of attachment or origin." [1]) [0] https://blog.janestreet.com/whats-in-a-name/ https://blog.janestreet.com/whats-in-a-name/ [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/distal#Adjective https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/distal#Adjective

sdrothrock 7y ago
> Whenever the topic of names comes up, I reread one of my favorite blog posts I've ever come across: "What's in a Name" by Olin Shivers [0]. Thank you for this! It was a really engrossing read. > When he said “distal access,” he assumed that you, too, have structures on one side of your head representing what you know about, say, Neil Armstrong, and a smaller structure on the other side of your brain encoding the name “Neil Armstrong,” and cognitive mechanisms allowing you to fetch the former given the latter. I thought this was an interesting example that glossed over some (to me) really interesting things in cross-contextual (usually cultural?) miscommunication. This assumption that the other person you're talking to has the same concept in mind for a word is at the root of all communication we do. A simple example would just be UK to US English -- something as simple as "fanny," which has differing meanings to both populations. For a non-geographical contextual gap, we can look at slang like "salty." a "salty meal," "salty boy," and "salty dog" are all completely different things. Some of the biggest difficulties I run into with communication aren't with people who speak no English at all (I live in Japan), but people who speak English in a dialect(?) that's close to what I expect, but slightly different and used differently (e.g. as high context instead of low context). Sometimes I can be speaking with someone from India who has perfectly grammatically correct, fluent English, and suddenly be thrown for a loop when I realize that a word had a completely different meaning for both of us without either of us realizing it. It's just a really interesting concept I think about a lot since I do a lot of cross-cultural communication.

sdrothrock 7y ago

> Whenever the topic of names comes up, I reread one of my favorite blog posts I've ever come across: "What's in a Name" by Olin Shivers [0]. Thank you for this! It was a really engrossing read. > When he said “distal access,” he assumed that you, too, have structures on one side of your head representing what you know about, say, Neil Armstrong, and a smaller structure on the other side of your brain encoding the name “Neil Armstrong,” and cognitive mechanisms allowing you to fetch the former given the latter. I thought this was an interesting example that glossed over some (to me) really interesting things in cross-contextual (usually cultural?) miscommunication. This assumption that the other person you're talking to has the same concept in mind for a word is at the root of all communication we do. A simple example would just be UK to US English -- something as simple as "fanny," which has differing meanings to both populations. For a non-geographical contextual gap, we can look at slang like "salty." a "salty meal," "salty boy," and "salty dog" are all completely different things. Some of the biggest difficulties I run into with communication aren't with people who speak no English at all (I live in Japan), but people who speak English in a dialect(?) that's close to what I expect, but slightly different and used differently (e.g. as high context instead of low context). Sometimes I can be speaking with someone from India who has perfectly grammatically correct, fluent English, and suddenly be thrown for a loop when I realize that a word had a completely different meaning for both of us without either of us realizing it. It's just a really interesting concept I think about a lot since I do a lot of cross-cultural communication.