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On a slightly off-topic comment, I really wish big companies would stop cooping technical terms for their product names. I clicked thru happily expecting an art
by SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
On a slightly off-topic comment, I really wish big companies would stop cooping technical terms for their product names. I clicked thru happily expecting an article about lambda as in anonymous functions or lambda calculus in general. I know, language evolves and yada yada, but when one actor purposefully forces a new ambiguous use of a word, that is not normal language evolution, that is language vandalism. If you want to use an existing word for your product name, at least pick something from other field, so there is no ambiguity in a specific context (e.g. in a computer forum the word "mouse" unambiguously means the input device, and the word "apache" certainly means the web server or parent org).
- chestervonwinch 5y agoThat they decided to call a DAG tool "AWS step functions" always puzzled me. I get it now -- like "step by step" -- but didn't a single person do a web search for "step function" beforehand to find it already has a totally separate meaning in mathematics and scientific applications?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tokamak-teapot 5y agoSomeone needs to have a word with Y Combinator.
- CodeAndCuffs 5y agoYou've put one of my biggest frustrations into words very well. Someone trying to learn about serverless architecture is immediately going to run into the serverless framework which will often have nothing to do with what they're trying to accomplish. Or trying to learn about the CLI (Command Line Interface or Common Language Infrastructure) A group is trying to propose a standardized language for querying graph databases, ala SQL. They decided to call it Graph Query Language. This has nothing to do with the GQL spec, which itself has nothing to do with graph databases. The biggest obstacles in this field really feel self erected sometimes.
- musingsole 5y ago"Graph" as used in "Graph Query Language" and "Graph Database" is synonymous. The bigger problem comes from naive practitioners using a word and insisting to novices it has one exclusive meaning when it plainly doesn't. "Lambda" is not a protected mathematical term. It's a Greek letter (and 500 other things besides)! The fact that 'lambda calculus' is a recognizable concept is itself a consequence of the language evolution you're complaining about.
- jawns 5y agoI use Lambda (capitalized) when referring to the AWS service and lambda (lowercase) when referring to anonymous functions. Seems to do the trick.