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> the way that tech people use "orthogonal" these days. If you mean the sense which means “independent”, that goes beyond tech. It was used that way by a law p
by antonvs 4y ago
> the way that tech people use "orthogonal" these days.
If you mean the sense which means “independent”, that goes beyond tech. It was used that way by a law professor in front of the Supreme Court in 2010: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/supreme_court_word_of_the_day_orthogonal https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/supreme_court_word_o...
In software, its use in that way dates back at least 30 years. E.g. from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016560749290317Z https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016560... (1992):
> It is shown that most of the above concepts are orthogonal, i.e., they can be implemented independently.
At that time, its use was already reasonably well established, although apparently not well enough to omit the i.e.
- antonvs 4y agoPossibly the first published use of the term in software was Van Wijngaarden, in the design of Algol 68, from 1968: > The number of independent primitive concepts has been minimized in order that the language be easy to describe, to learn, and to implement. On the other hand, these concepts have been applied “orthogonally” in order to maximize the expressive power of the language while trying to avoid deleterious superfluities. https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Algol68_revised_report-AB-600dpi.pdf https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/A... , section 0.1.2, Orthogonality.