Don't mean to disagree with you substantively, but just a note on words: The colloquial meaning of "orthogonal" seems to be "all combinations of these things e

Don't mean to disagree with you substantively, but just a note on words: The colloquial meaning of "orthogonal" seems to be "all combinations of these things exist or could exist in theory". That's all good and well, but there's a more faithful way to translate the mathematical concept of orthogonality: "uncorrelated". (Correlation is scaled covariation, which is basically dot product.) Adopting this usage might add some signal to online conversations, e.g. when one hears something like "TDD is orthogonal to Fortran", one could reply "hmm, that's not strictly orthogonal, the real-world correlation seems to be nonzero and negative, which means some real phenomenon must be causing it".