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by johncolanduoni 3332 days ago
I'm just miffed that they're complaining about names that are actual words. How would you like if they were all named after their discoverers, and therefore an a priori undistinguished mishmash of proper names? (cf. separation axioms[1])

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_axiom

3 comments

That's pretty funny. I'm sure memorizing the differences between the Hausdorff, the completely Hausdorff, the regular Hausdorff, the normal Hausdorff, the completely normal Hausdorff, and the perfectly normal Hausdorff must be fun.
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. —Phil Karlton

oh, and:

The first step towards wisdom is calling things by their right names. —Anonymous Chinese Proverb

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.
It doesn't help to use "actual words" when those words have no discernible relationship to their usage. And I don't just mean "common" usage, but the usage by others in related fields. "affine" and "linear" are commonplace concepts in mathematics, but it is in no way clear how they relate to type systems, let alone what properties a type system has when described as such.

The only other fields I know of where things are as badly named are are abstract algebra (ideal, ring, module) and grammar (infinitive, perfect, accusative). It seems to be no coincidence that type theory straddles the two.