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pet peeve: idempotency is badly named. idempotent literally translated is ‘same power.’ two or more things having the same power doesn’t necessarily mean they p
by yawboakye 3y ago
pet peeve: idempotency is badly named. idempotent literally translated is ‘same power.’ two or more things having the same power doesn’t necessarily mean they produce same, single result. if that were the case we wouldn’t need the special handling for idempotent instructions/commands/actions to ensure duplicates are not created.
- kevinventullo 3y agoI’m not totally sure, but in math “idempotent” elements are those for which x^2 = x. And so in software engineering it refers to operations for which doing them twice has the same effect as doing them once. Maybe this is what is meant by “same power”?
- yawboakye 3y agoi could agree with you. my pet peeve is that the name of the phenomenon where repeated executions result in same result (where same even includes unique identifier) shouldn't be idempotency. especially in computing where, in my experience, any attempt to implement it involves some logic which checks to see if we've already observed the desired effect of the action.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- charcircuit 3y agoIt refers to functions where f(x) = x.
- Mavvie 3y agoThat's actually the formula for nullipotency, where applying it 0 times is the same as applying it any number of times. I believe idempotency is when f(f(x)) = f(x)
- chowells 3y agoNo, it refers to functions f where forall x, f(f(x)) = f(x). You can abuse notation slightly to see this as f^2(x) = f(x). (This kind of notation is actually used enough to be comfortable to most mathematicians.) From here it's not much of a stretch to eta-contract this to f^2 = f. And so we've ended up back in the same place...