> this particular one leaves a bit of a taste of a maths article written by a crackpot That gave me a good laugh! I do understand the issue and I am not a bril

> this particular one leaves a bit of a taste of a maths article written by a crackpot That gave me a good laugh! I do understand the issue and I am not a brilliant writer in this regard. I was trying to make it understandable to the average programmer but also be at least "correct", and I think I have kind of failed at both in this article. I wanted to make sure that the ideas I was trying to express made sense not just to me or in speech form, but in written form too. I added all those definitions, including "value", because I know so many people who use the terms "value" and "object" interchangeably and assume all values are "objects" in the OOP sense. So I wanted to make a distinction between the two, as I wanted to emphasize the object-ness as the key relationship, not the value-ness. I am quite interested in how people build mental models of things and how they think about programming in general, but there is very little on the topic currently. And ownership semantics (even the name alone) has a lot of implicit assumptions tagged along to it that I wanted to understand. In sum, "ownership" is the wrong word but oh well, silly history. And yes, "linear hierarchy" does come from biology. It does mean "linear order" in that sense. That is a much better way of explaining it succinctly. Interesting you brought up Wirth, since he is one of my idols and that book is absolutely amazing. I always recommend Wirth to beginners wanting to learn how to write compilers.