[blackrock]

I'm not going to call anyone out here, but why do people keep using the word orthogonal?

It doesn't even compute. It doesn't even make any sense, in how they use it in relation to the topic.

Are the issues at right angles of one another? No.

Are the issues statistically independent of one another? Perhaps.

I suggest to use a more appropriate descriptive word to describe the situation.

You folks should read the urban meaning of orthogonal, to understand how people roll their eyes at you, when you inappropriately use the term.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=orthogonal

Just another friendly PSA.

[ternaryoperator]

That's how languages evolve. Words that meant one very distinct thing come to mean something only partially like the original. People decry the misuse. And finally the new meaning becomes the one true meaning and the original sense is marked in dictionaries as "archaic."

For a word that's gone through that exact cycle, have a stare at "artificial," which was the adjective for "artifice," which at one time meant craftsmanship. When St. Paul's Cathedral was first shown to King Charles II, he praised it for being "very artificial" -- a compliment. [1]

In the meantime, I agree that it can be frustrating to see words apparently misused. But I think this is hardly the mark of an "idiot," as you put it.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/31/st-pauls-cathedral/

[sanderjd]

Oh wow I totally disagree. I have always found the computer science usage of "orthogonal" to be very analogous to orthogonal sets in linear algebra. It is only in two dimensions that it boils down to right angles; That's the uninteresting case! The more general concept is one of independence, of something being broken down into its constituent parts, such that each part is pulling its weight in some way that even all the other parts combined could not. Which is exactly how I see it being used here. I still remember the moment my programming languages professor introduced the concept of orthogonality in that field; I intuitively grasped the meaning and was awed by that power of analogy.

[wwweston]

What does it mean for something to be at a right angle to something else?

There's a euclidean geometric answer to that statement, but it's hardly the only correct answer.

When people use it to mean that they're speaking of two issues that have a range of independent possibilities, it's not wrong to invoke linearly independent bases.

[abiox]

is english a second language for you? 'orthogonal' is frequently used to indicate two things are not directly related or dependent.

> You folks should read the urban meaning of orthogonal

nope, nope, nope. that site's a hive of scum and villainy, and a massive number of entries are just random nonsense.

i'd rather go to wiktionary[0], which includes:

"Of two or more problems or subjects, independent of or irrelevant to each other."

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orthogonal

[Izkata]

> You folks should read the urban meaning of orthogonal, to understand how people roll their eyes at you, when you inappropriately use the term.

If that mattered at all, then we'd have stopped using other remapped words first, like "tree".