7 ms·

Avoid Meaningless Binary Labels

98 points by bobbiechen 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zestyping 5y ago
Excellent point. Other examples of easily invertible binary labels: - "Little-endian" vs. "big-endian": Does "little-endian" mean the little part is at the end or at the beginning? Why not "minor-first" and "major-first"? - "Type 1 diabetes" vs. "type 2 diabetes": Why not "insulin deficiency" and "insulin impotence"?
- menage 5y ago
  "Little-endian" and "big-endian" aren't completely meaningless - they originally came from a description of the history/war between two nations in Gulliver's Travels who disagreed about which end of an egg to open first (the big end or the little end)[1]. Bearing that in mind, it feels fairly natural to think of little-endian as meaning that you start (open) the transmission with the little part of the word. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu
  - bregma 5y ago
    Shaka, when the walls fell.
  - squabble 5y ago
    In my opinion, these are bad names and we would all have saved a lot of brain power if simple and clearly meaningful names were chosen. The cultural reference in the names preserves the opinion that the choice of byte order is not worth fighting about. But this is an extra piece of information that's not needed. Moreover, the choice of the word "end" is unfortunate, since it means both "boundary" (as in the 2 ends of an egg) and "conclusion" (as in the end of a transmission). To make matters worse, they chose to have "little endian" refer to the case where the big (most significant) byte is at the end of a transmission. Better names might be something like "smallest-first byte order". Edit: If you are confused, think of it this way: Little-endian = little end first Big-endian = big end first
    - menage 5y ago
      Agreed, they're not the clearest of names, particularly in a global cultural context. But they're not totally arbitrary like "type 1 error" and "type 2 error".
      - zestyping 5y ago
        The thing that this article seemed to be getting at was not just whether the names have meaning — I interpreted it to be specifically about whether two names are easily swappable. It's a dichotomy, but which way does it go? "Little-endian" is the perfect example: it clearly has something to do with little and big, but it's impossible to tell from the words which one means LSB-first and which one means MSB-first.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    Little endian: Least significant byte at Lowest address. It's definitely not meaningless. I also tend to think of it as the Logical one (the significance grows with the address.) All that alliteration aids acceptance and allows accurate agreement.
    - tjoff 5y ago
      Oh, so naturally big endian is most significant byte at largest address?
      - zestyping 5y ago
        Heads I win, tails you lose.
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      “endian” … end is the last part of something. It would imply that big/little is describing the last address, not the first. When it comes to how to store numbers, in English, we read the highest value from the right to the lowest value on the left. Your “logical” is counter to how English-speaking people write numbers.
      - OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
        > When it comes to how to store numbers, in English, we read the highest value from the right to the lowest value on the left. Huh? When I read 24, "twentyfour", the highest value is on the left, followed by less high values on the right, and spoken in that order. It's actually different in other languages, in dutch for example I would say "vierEnTwintig", or "four and twenty" translated directly, so saying the least high value first. (... However this is only for the two digits, because upwards we'll say "honderdVierEnTwintig", or "hunderd four and twenty")
        kayodelycaon 5y ago
        I mixed up right and left.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    It is very clearly a reference to this story about a societal schism arising from a meaningless choice. But it doesn’t really make it clear which is which. You say clearly little endian means you start with the little part. But why couldn’t it be that little endian means the end is the little part? Endian is not a word that means anything apart from the Gulliver’s Travels story or the order of bytes.
- tempodox 5y ago
  Naming things remains hard, and not only in software development. I suspect it's a human weakness, giving in to oversimplification, cultural preferences, or just bad habits. We could name examples ad infinitum.
- tomjakubowski 5y ago
  the two types of diabetes are sometimes called "insulin dependent" and "insulin resistant"
- ufo 5y ago
  One that my brain always had a hard time with was "callee-saved" and "caller-saved" registers. I wish more people used "call preserved" and "call clobbered" instead.
hermannj314 5y ago
Nice article. Red State vs. Blue State in bipartisan US politics is an inappropriately meaningless binary label while red node vs. black node in a binary tree is an appropriately meaningless binary label. I feel like that makes sense to me.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  In the US, the first color electoral map to be televised used blue for Republican. In 2000 Red was used for Republicans and since that year involved lots of viewing of the maps due to the protected counting, it stuck
  - toast0 5y ago
    In 2000 and earlier elections, different networks used different colors, without a lot of consistency from election to election. It was only after that election that there became a strong immutable consensus on what color was what.
- nvader 5y ago
  I just read your comment about red/black, and I must confess, until this point I would have agreed that it was meaningless. However, I just looked over the definition of the data structure, and I think I can propose better names. Black nodes are 'counted' nodes, whereas red are 'uncounted'. Uncounted nodes may sit sandwiched between counted nodes, but are not allowed to follow each other... Because relaxing that rule could lead to an explosion of uncounted nodes. Remember that the length of the path, in terms of counted nodes, to every leaf is the same. Because the uncounted nodes may be sandwiched between those counted nodes, this gives us the property we want that the length of the path of actual nodes, counted and uncounted, on the longest path is never more than twice that of the shortest path. The longest path can have every layer be a counted-uncounted sandwich, while the shortest will only have counted nodes. I felt like changing the name added something.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Not to mention that the rest of the world uses "red" for various sorts of socialist / social democrat / center-left parties (e.g. "traffic light coalition", "watermelon coalition"), whereas the US uses it for the right - in the map context only. Red/black makes me think of the card suits.
l0b0 5y ago
Is there a type 3 error? If not, or if the question is as meaningless as I suspect, why would anyone ever want to use "type 1 error"/"type 2 error" rather than "false positive" and "false negative" (or the other way around, I refuse to look it up)? Is someone golfing research papers, trying to save two characters here and there?
- Rygian 5y ago
  Type 3 error is "giving the right answer to the wrong question" [1] and there are uses for a Type 4 error. This digs into the realm of the "not even wrong" statements. [2] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_III_error https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_III_error [2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
  - ljm 5y ago
    In the world of boolean logic this could be expressed as: Type I: true Type II: false Type IV: FileNotFound
  - l0b0 5y ago
    "The wrong question" is subjective though. I meant in the technical sense.
junon 5y ago
> "upstream and downstream" in microservice architecture. Those terms are used in relation to dependencies and who consumes what. It has nothing to do with microservice architectures. This article seems to talk a lot about... nothing. I don't really see the point it's trying to make - we use technical terms not to be human friendly but to be technical. We're not writing for children or for laymen all the time.
- johndoughy 5y ago
  > Those terms are used in relation to dependencies and who consumes what. I think your response exactly illustrates the point of the post: if upstream and downstream had clearer names, you wouldn't need to define them. And if they indeed mean what you say, wouldn't producer and consumer be clearer? > I don't really see the point it's trying to make - we use technical terms not to be human friendly but to be technical. I don't think I can agree that technical terms aren't meant to be human friendly. After all, languages exist to convery ideas to other humans; words aren't opcodes intended to be executed by machines. If technical terms aren't meant to be human friendly, why did humans invent them at all? And if they are intended to be human friendly, why not optimize them for clarity and precision?
  - junon 5y ago
    > wouldn't producer and consumer be clearer? Absolutely not. It makes no sense. "There was a producer outage." means nothing. Neither does "I'll have to file a bug with the producer dependency."
- nvader 5y ago
  But we are writing for humans, and so ease of recollection is a key result that our technical terms are measured against. Do not make the mistake that technical terms need to be inscrutable, for by hanging on ideas that the student or brew practitioner may have encountered in their life, we can give them a peg to hang their understanding of the concept that we are trying to explain. Consider, for example, the technical terms, durability, integrity, power, confidentiality, friendly, field, cross.
- 5y ago
andreareina 5y ago
Binary has nothing to do with it insofar that the space is adequately described by two labels. The problem is solely that the labels are unclear, and the argument of the article is harmed by bringing binary into it. I could just as easily extend the colored functions[1] analogy by bringing into it yellow functions that are also annoying to call and have their own incompatibilities[2], and now we have three labels, red/blue/yellow which tell me nothing at all; honestly I don't even remember which ones are red functions and which ones are blue. Of course in the case of the original article the labels are supposed to be arbitrary and don't matter, but responses to it continue to use the colors and thus attach semantic significance to them. [1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/ https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...
- xphx 5y ago
  I think you are correct and am confused why you're being voted down without explanation.
  - tgv 5y ago
    IMO too, it's a stronger argument. The duplicity (which would have been a great word to use in the article) is not the point: open and closed are suitable metaphors for systems. It's the semantic gap/lack of relation between concept and name, and that applies to any other arity as well. It's just that binary separations are very frequent: we really like to split the world in two.
- bobbiechen 5y ago
  (Author here) Thanks, that's fair criticism. My frustration with the binary case specifically is that because there are only two options, and they should be easier to name for that reason. I didn't really explain that in the post, though, which is my fault. Yes, these are a subset of unclear naming. I do think naming is such a broad topic that talking about specific subtypes of bad naming is useful, to sharpen our awareness around those specific pitfalls. In colored functions, yeah, it's unfortunate that some readers continue to extend the (meaningless) colors metaphor, which helped remove preconceptions about sync/async to make a point. I wish people wouldn't do that. See also, the fictitious "Nacirema" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem... .
eternityforest 5y ago
I suspect aesthetics has more to do with it than people think. Everyone loves a secret code, and Hollywood has made an art of of technobabble. When you say "It's fine, we're on a class 2 supply" you sound really cool and high tech and professional. It's almost like sprinkling in a latin phrase or some legalese, but instead of conveying a very precise meaning, where even the informal general implications are well known, it adds confusion. There's always a sense of mystique to these "Domain specific natural languages", but not that many reasons to use them, so people are probably kinda drawn to slip them in.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  This. I call the drive to sprinkling one's language with technical terms, acronyms and industry/specialist jargon "going Scientologist". I use this term because, if you've ever known one, they have specialize meanings to a lot of terms and that creates an "in crowd" feeling for their members and an exclusionary club sensation for those on the outside peering in. It is ordinary high school popularity clique dynamics, which works perfectly well on far too many "adults".
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I kind of disagree. Our brains are very good at learning new words given the correct circumstances. Learning words is an effortless process that occurs through seeing them in context, and the nuance of having specific terminology is often extremely useful. As a concrete example, if you say "I'm thinking slowly right now", someone might assume you have brain fog or some sort of trouble concentrating unless they've read a particular book. If you say you are using System II-thinking, they either get it because they've read that book, or they understand that they don't and can save themselves a lot of time and confusion and ask what you mean. Using a simpler word for endianness does not spare you from having to understand endianness, but it might mislead you into thinking you do when you don't. Re-using simple words can be confusing, and understanding that you do not not understand a word can actually be a feature, especially in technical writing. As a good counter example, the word 'service' is used way too much in too many different ways. If someone says 'the service isn't working', they could mean the entire web application is down, the kubernetes Service-abstraction is misconfgiured, what it's running is broken, or some piece of code ending in "Service" doesn't compile.
- jl6 5y ago
  > Re-using simple words can be confusing, and understanding that you do not not understand a word can actually be a feature, especially in technical writing. I would add something that is counterintuitive but unsurprising to people who have children: learning long/complicated words is actually not a problem at all. Kids love learning and saying long words with interesting sounds in them. Sometimes it’s even easier to learn long/complicated words because they are easier to distinguish from shorter words. Ask any 4 year old whether they would rather say “Tyrannosaurus Rex” or “dino”.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > they either get it because they've read that book, or they understand that they don't and can save themselves a lot of time and confusion and ask what you mean. I've read that book and several other works on the subject and I still can't remember which one is system I and which is system II. I get why they use those labels (because they don't want to pre-suppose the characteristics of what they're investigating). But I do find them frustratingly undescriptive.
tome 5y ago
Ah yes, boolean blindness.
benjamir 5y ago
"Shift left", my current favourite IT buzz word blunder.
tyingq 5y ago
I was surprised by this: "Worst of all, imagine this: you've just started an internship at a tech company with a microservices-based architecture. When service A initiates a message to service B, one of them is called the "upstream", and the other is the "downstream". Which one is which? There's no inherent direction, so even within the industry, people don't agree!" For me, upstream always means "toward the original caller", or "toward the customer/person with the web browser". I had never heard his linked example of something thinking they were "calling an upstream function". If you're the caller, you are upstream from what you're calling. Is that just me?
- gnabgib 5y ago
  So it sounds like you're using the service communication to mean the stream? Although "toward the original caller" suggests that two inter communicating services would be flip-flopping for ownership of "upstream". Aardvark calls Bear, Aardvark is upstream, Bear calls Aardvark.. Bear is upstream. Stream could also refer to data (upstream=original/raw, downstream=processed/final), the overall process stage (upstream=prior stage, downstream=next stage - this requires knowledge of the system architecture, the stage boundaries are likely business-defined), some business term (eg in energy upstream=energy producer, downstream=consumer). A stream and the messaging direction may not match.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    I agree with that, but in this case, the author had already scoped it down to services calling other services in a "microservices" context. And even if the call graph is a->b->c->a->b, I can still say up/down if I give the context of which invocation. I'm hoping people don't do that much in real life though, too easy to recurse.
- nkurz 5y ago
  If I'm understanding you right, I think I had equal confidence in the opposite direction. In my mind, responses always flow downstream. It's obviously not just you, but at this point I think the right conclusion is the concept is too conflicted to be used unless one is speaking to a small group who has already agreed on a local definition. What I'm not sure yet is whether the terminology is equally conflicted when talking about open-source projects. If one project depends on another, do we agree that the dependency is downstream of the original? That is, does everyone still agree that the official Linux Kernel is upstream of all Linux distributions? Or do some people view the patches to the kernel as being sent downstream?
tpoacher 5y ago
Ironically, of course, one such label is the adjective "meaningless", which is rather unnecessarily binary in nature.

98 points by bobbiechen 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Excellent point. Other examples of easily invertible binary labels: - "Little-endian" vs. "big-endian": Does "little-endian" mean the little part is at the end or at the beginning? Why not "minor-first" and "major-first"? - "Type 1 diabetes" vs. "type 2 diabetes": Why not "insulin deficiency" and "insulin impotence"?

menage 5y ago
"Little-endian" and "big-endian" aren't completely meaningless - they originally came from a description of the history/war between two nations in Gulliver's Travels who disagreed about which end of an egg to open first (the big end or the little end)[1]. Bearing that in mind, it feels fairly natural to think of little-endian as meaning that you start (open) the transmission with the little part of the word. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu
- bregma 5y ago
  Shaka, when the walls fell.
- squabble 5y ago
  In my opinion, these are bad names and we would all have saved a lot of brain power if simple and clearly meaningful names were chosen. The cultural reference in the names preserves the opinion that the choice of byte order is not worth fighting about. But this is an extra piece of information that's not needed. Moreover, the choice of the word "end" is unfortunate, since it means both "boundary" (as in the 2 ends of an egg) and "conclusion" (as in the end of a transmission). To make matters worse, they chose to have "little endian" refer to the case where the big (most significant) byte is at the end of a transmission. Better names might be something like "smallest-first byte order". Edit: If you are confused, think of it this way: Little-endian = little end first Big-endian = big end first
  - menage 5y ago
    Agreed, they're not the clearest of names, particularly in a global cultural context. But they're not totally arbitrary like "type 1 error" and "type 2 error".
    - zestyping 5y ago
      The thing that this article seemed to be getting at was not just whether the names have meaning — I interpreted it to be specifically about whether two names are easily swappable. It's a dichotomy, but which way does it go? "Little-endian" is the perfect example: it clearly has something to do with little and big, but it's impossible to tell from the words which one means LSB-first and which one means MSB-first.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Little endian: Least significant byte at Lowest address. It's definitely not meaningless. I also tend to think of it as the Logical one (the significance grows with the address.) All that alliteration aids acceptance and allows accurate agreement.
  - tjoff 5y ago
    Oh, so naturally big endian is most significant byte at largest address?
    - zestyping 5y ago
      Heads I win, tails you lose.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    “endian” … end is the last part of something. It would imply that big/little is describing the last address, not the first. When it comes to how to store numbers, in English, we read the highest value from the right to the lowest value on the left. Your “logical” is counter to how English-speaking people write numbers.
    - OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
      > When it comes to how to store numbers, in English, we read the highest value from the right to the lowest value on the left. Huh? When I read 24, "twentyfour", the highest value is on the left, followed by less high values on the right, and spoken in that order. It's actually different in other languages, in dutch for example I would say "vierEnTwintig", or "four and twenty" translated directly, so saying the least high value first. (... However this is only for the two digits, because upwards we'll say "honderdVierEnTwintig", or "hunderd four and twenty")
      - kayodelycaon 5y ago
        I mixed up right and left.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  It is very clearly a reference to this story about a societal schism arising from a meaningless choice. But it doesn’t really make it clear which is which. You say clearly little endian means you start with the little part. But why couldn’t it be that little endian means the end is the little part? Endian is not a word that means anything apart from the Gulliver’s Travels story or the order of bytes.
tempodox 5y ago
Naming things remains hard, and not only in software development. I suspect it's a human weakness, giving in to oversimplification, cultural preferences, or just bad habits. We could name examples ad infinitum.
tomjakubowski 5y ago
the two types of diabetes are sometimes called "insulin dependent" and "insulin resistant"
ufo 5y ago
One that my brain always had a hard time with was "callee-saved" and "caller-saved" registers. I wish more people used "call preserved" and "call clobbered" instead.

hermannj314 5y ago

Nice article. Red State vs. Blue State in bipartisan US politics is an inappropriately meaningless binary label while red node vs. black node in a binary tree is an appropriately meaningless binary label. I feel like that makes sense to me.

aidenn0 5y ago
In the US, the first color electoral map to be televised used blue for Republican. In 2000 Red was used for Republicans and since that year involved lots of viewing of the maps due to the protected counting, it stuck
- toast0 5y ago
  In 2000 and earlier elections, different networks used different colors, without a lot of consistency from election to election. It was only after that election that there became a strong immutable consensus on what color was what.
nvader 5y ago
I just read your comment about red/black, and I must confess, until this point I would have agreed that it was meaningless. However, I just looked over the definition of the data structure, and I think I can propose better names. Black nodes are 'counted' nodes, whereas red are 'uncounted'. Uncounted nodes may sit sandwiched between counted nodes, but are not allowed to follow each other... Because relaxing that rule could lead to an explosion of uncounted nodes. Remember that the length of the path, in terms of counted nodes, to every leaf is the same. Because the uncounted nodes may be sandwiched between those counted nodes, this gives us the property we want that the length of the path of actual nodes, counted and uncounted, on the longest path is never more than twice that of the shortest path. The longest path can have every layer be a counted-uncounted sandwich, while the shortest will only have counted nodes. I felt like changing the name added something.
pjc50 5y ago
Not to mention that the rest of the world uses "red" for various sorts of socialist / social democrat / center-left parties (e.g. "traffic light coalition", "watermelon coalition"), whereas the US uses it for the right - in the map context only. Red/black makes me think of the card suits.

l0b0 5y ago

Is there a type 3 error? If not, or if the question is as meaningless as I suspect, why would anyone ever want to use "type 1 error"/"type 2 error" rather than "false positive" and "false negative" (or the other way around, I refuse to look it up)? Is someone golfing research papers, trying to save two characters here and there?

Rygian 5y ago
Type 3 error is "giving the right answer to the wrong question" [1] and there are uses for a Type 4 error. This digs into the realm of the "not even wrong" statements. [2] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_III_error https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_III_error [2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
- ljm 5y ago
  In the world of boolean logic this could be expressed as: Type I: true Type II: false Type IV: FileNotFound
- l0b0 5y ago
  "The wrong question" is subjective though. I meant in the technical sense.

junon 5y ago

> "upstream and downstream" in microservice architecture. Those terms are used in relation to dependencies and who consumes what. It has nothing to do with microservice architectures. This article seems to talk a lot about... nothing. I don't really see the point it's trying to make - we use technical terms not to be human friendly but to be technical. We're not writing for children or for laymen all the time.

johndoughy 5y ago
> Those terms are used in relation to dependencies and who consumes what. I think your response exactly illustrates the point of the post: if upstream and downstream had clearer names, you wouldn't need to define them. And if they indeed mean what you say, wouldn't producer and consumer be clearer? > I don't really see the point it's trying to make - we use technical terms not to be human friendly but to be technical. I don't think I can agree that technical terms aren't meant to be human friendly. After all, languages exist to convery ideas to other humans; words aren't opcodes intended to be executed by machines. If technical terms aren't meant to be human friendly, why did humans invent them at all? And if they are intended to be human friendly, why not optimize them for clarity and precision?
- junon 5y ago
  > wouldn't producer and consumer be clearer? Absolutely not. It makes no sense. "There was a producer outage." means nothing. Neither does "I'll have to file a bug with the producer dependency."
nvader 5y ago
But we are writing for humans, and so ease of recollection is a key result that our technical terms are measured against. Do not make the mistake that technical terms need to be inscrutable, for by hanging on ideas that the student or brew practitioner may have encountered in their life, we can give them a peg to hang their understanding of the concept that we are trying to explain. Consider, for example, the technical terms, durability, integrity, power, confidentiality, friendly, field, cross.
5y ago

andreareina 5y ago

Binary has nothing to do with it insofar that the space is adequately described by two labels. The problem is solely that the labels are unclear, and the argument of the article is harmed by bringing binary into it. I could just as easily extend the colored functions[1] analogy by bringing into it yellow functions that are also annoying to call and have their own incompatibilities[2], and now we have three labels, red/blue/yellow which tell me nothing at all; honestly I don't even remember which ones are red functions and which ones are blue. Of course in the case of the original article the labels are supposed to be arbitrary and don't matter, but responses to it continue to use the colors and thus attach semantic significance to them. [1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/ https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...

xphx 5y ago
I think you are correct and am confused why you're being voted down without explanation.
- tgv 5y ago
  IMO too, it's a stronger argument. The duplicity (which would have been a great word to use in the article) is not the point: open and closed are suitable metaphors for systems. It's the semantic gap/lack of relation between concept and name, and that applies to any other arity as well. It's just that binary separations are very frequent: we really like to split the world in two.
bobbiechen 5y ago
(Author here) Thanks, that's fair criticism. My frustration with the binary case specifically is that because there are only two options, and they should be easier to name for that reason. I didn't really explain that in the post, though, which is my fault. Yes, these are a subset of unclear naming. I do think naming is such a broad topic that talking about specific subtypes of bad naming is useful, to sharpen our awareness around those specific pitfalls. In colored functions, yeah, it's unfortunate that some readers continue to extend the (meaningless) colors metaphor, which helped remove preconceptions about sync/async to make a point. I wish people wouldn't do that. See also, the fictitious "Nacirema" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem... .

eternityforest 5y ago

I suspect aesthetics has more to do with it than people think. Everyone loves a secret code, and Hollywood has made an art of of technobabble. When you say "It's fine, we're on a class 2 supply" you sound really cool and high tech and professional. It's almost like sprinkling in a latin phrase or some legalese, but instead of conveying a very precise meaning, where even the informal general implications are well known, it adds confusion. There's always a sense of mystique to these "Domain specific natural languages", but not that many reasons to use them, so people are probably kinda drawn to slip them in.

bsenftner 5y ago
This. I call the drive to sprinkling one's language with technical terms, acronyms and industry/specialist jargon "going Scientologist". I use this term because, if you've ever known one, they have specialize meanings to a lot of terms and that creates an "in crowd" feeling for their members and an exclusionary club sensation for those on the outside peering in. It is ordinary high school popularity clique dynamics, which works perfectly well on far too many "adults".

marginalia_nu 5y ago

I kind of disagree. Our brains are very good at learning new words given the correct circumstances. Learning words is an effortless process that occurs through seeing them in context, and the nuance of having specific terminology is often extremely useful. As a concrete example, if you say "I'm thinking slowly right now", someone might assume you have brain fog or some sort of trouble concentrating unless they've read a particular book. If you say you are using System II-thinking, they either get it because they've read that book, or they understand that they don't and can save themselves a lot of time and confusion and ask what you mean. Using a simpler word for endianness does not spare you from having to understand endianness, but it might mislead you into thinking you do when you don't. Re-using simple words can be confusing, and understanding that you do not not understand a word can actually be a feature, especially in technical writing. As a good counter example, the word 'service' is used way too much in too many different ways. If someone says 'the service isn't working', they could mean the entire web application is down, the kubernetes Service-abstraction is misconfgiured, what it's running is broken, or some piece of code ending in "Service" doesn't compile.

jl6 5y ago
> Re-using simple words can be confusing, and understanding that you do not not understand a word can actually be a feature, especially in technical writing. I would add something that is counterintuitive but unsurprising to people who have children: learning long/complicated words is actually not a problem at all. Kids love learning and saying long words with interesting sounds in them. Sometimes it’s even easier to learn long/complicated words because they are easier to distinguish from shorter words. Ask any 4 year old whether they would rather say “Tyrannosaurus Rex” or “dino”.
nicoburns 5y ago
> they either get it because they've read that book, or they understand that they don't and can save themselves a lot of time and confusion and ask what you mean. I've read that book and several other works on the subject and I still can't remember which one is system I and which is system II. I get why they use those labels (because they don't want to pre-suppose the characteristics of what they're investigating). But I do find them frustratingly undescriptive.

tome 5y ago

Ah yes, boolean blindness.

benjamir 5y ago

"Shift left", my current favourite IT buzz word blunder.

tyingq 5y ago

I was surprised by this: "Worst of all, imagine this: you've just started an internship at a tech company with a microservices-based architecture. When service A initiates a message to service B, one of them is called the "upstream", and the other is the "downstream". Which one is which? There's no inherent direction, so even within the industry, people don't agree!" For me, upstream always means "toward the original caller", or "toward the customer/person with the web browser". I had never heard his linked example of something thinking they were "calling an upstream function". If you're the caller, you are upstream from what you're calling. Is that just me?

gnabgib 5y ago
So it sounds like you're using the service communication to mean the stream? Although "toward the original caller" suggests that two inter communicating services would be flip-flopping for ownership of "upstream". Aardvark calls Bear, Aardvark is upstream, Bear calls Aardvark.. Bear is upstream. Stream could also refer to data (upstream=original/raw, downstream=processed/final), the overall process stage (upstream=prior stage, downstream=next stage - this requires knowledge of the system architecture, the stage boundaries are likely business-defined), some business term (eg in energy upstream=energy producer, downstream=consumer). A stream and the messaging direction may not match.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I agree with that, but in this case, the author had already scoped it down to services calling other services in a "microservices" context. And even if the call graph is a->b->c->a->b, I can still say up/down if I give the context of which invocation. I'm hoping people don't do that much in real life though, too easy to recurse.
nkurz 5y ago
If I'm understanding you right, I think I had equal confidence in the opposite direction. In my mind, responses always flow downstream. It's obviously not just you, but at this point I think the right conclusion is the concept is too conflicted to be used unless one is speaking to a small group who has already agreed on a local definition. What I'm not sure yet is whether the terminology is equally conflicted when talking about open-source projects. If one project depends on another, do we agree that the dependency is downstream of the original? That is, does everyone still agree that the official Linux Kernel is upstream of all Linux distributions? Or do some people view the patches to the kernel as being sent downstream?

tpoacher 5y ago

Ironically, of course, one such label is the adjective "meaningless", which is rather unnecessarily binary in nature.