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by yarvin9 3658 days ago
You're very eloquent and also learned. But for every programmer who knows what an ANSI Lisp "boa constructor" is, there are 100 who know what a C++ constructor is. And it's an 11-letter word that means something completely different in a completely different language.

But maybe it's worth it to stop the middlebrow dismissals! Our grandparents went to the moon. We complain when we have to learn a slightly new idea, and faint like Victorians contemplating legs if it has a new name.

"Argument" is another good one. Hoon is a single-argument language that favors tuples, not currying. So an add function, (add a b), is actually (add [a b]), or in Lisp (add (cons a b)).

In Hoon, you can call a and b "arguments" all day long. It's an informal word. But [a b] is "the sample." You can see the chaos that would result if we called it "the argument" or "the parameter"...