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Oooh don't even get me started on how they name things after people instead of anything remotely descriptive or helpful. Imagine if you named functions after yo
by phailhaus 6y ago
Oooh don't even get me started on how they name things after people instead of anything remotely descriptive or helpful. Imagine if you named functions after yourself.
- taeric 6y agoShell's sort would like a word. Or Bloom's filter, for that matter...
- dhosek 6y agoOr currying
- Jtsummers 6y agoDijkstra's algorithm, Turing machines, von Neumann architecture, Hoare triples, Hamming distance, Levenshtein distance, Fisher-Yates (or Knute) shuffle, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_algorithms - many of the items in this list are named after people.
- beagle3 6y agoKrebs' cycle, HeLa cells and Lugol's formula in medicine as well; And also an Allen key, a Phillips screwdriver, many of the physical units (Ampere, Volt, Tesla, Weber, Newton, ...). It happens in all fields. For that matter, the Hebrew word for masturbation is named after Onan, who was described in the bible as having done so.
- robocat 6y agoOnanism and related words exist in English and other languages too: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/onanism https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/onanism
- dhosek 6y agoIn fact, Onan is not described as masturbating in the Bible, but rather pulling out when he was supposed to impregnate his brother's widow. There is no explicit mention of masturbation in the Bible.
- User23 6y agoKolmogorov complexity
- ben_bradley 6y agoAnd then there is the Hann window function, sometimes called ... "named after Julius von Hann, and sometimes referred to as Hanning, presumably due to its linguistic and formulaic similarities to the Hamming window." Wikipedia, window function
- tartoran 6y agoI find it a good thing to name it after someone who discovered something or pioneered branch in the field. Sometimes it makes it confusing but most of the time the name reference makes it very easy to remember as well
- phailhaus 6y agoIf that were true, then why don't we do the same thing for programming? We only do that for languages and algorithms (which I'm still not a fan of), but everything else tries to have descriptive names because then it's easier to understand how it fits together with other concepts. If we called for loops "bobs" and while loops "jims", how are you supposed to know how they are related, structurally?
- tartoran 6y agoMathematical concepts are more general and abstract and so a short description is sometimes hard or inconvenient to describe without overlapping dozens of other concepts. Wherever it makes sense there are all sorts of descriptive names : loops, knots and so on
- WalterBright 6y ago> Imagine if you named functions after yourself. Ooh, good idea! I'm getting sick and tired of foo(), it's time for walter().