[yiyus]

> ask a non programmer

Why should a non programmer understand programming terms? Words have different meanings in different contexts. That's how words work. There is no need to make these terms understandable to anyone. The layman does not need to understand the meaning of long or word in C source code.

Ask a non-golf player what is an eagle or ask a physicist, a mathematician and a politic the meaning of power.

Word and long may have been poor word choices, but asking a non-programmer is not a good way to test it.

[oblio]

> Ask a non-golf player what is an eagle or ask a physicist, a mathematician and a politic (sic) the meaning of power.

All those fields could do with less jargon. Especially since in many cases there is a common word.

Lawyers especially give me the impression that they use jargon to obscure their field from regular folks.

Our field, being new, should not make the same mistakes, but yet, here we are, where the default "file viewer" on Unix is cat, the pager is called "more", etc.

I don't see any reason why those types could not have had descriptive names from the start. Well, there was one, lack of experience, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[thechao]

Dejargonification is great; I agree that jargon is a real barrier to entry. However, after having dealt with lawyers (and doctors of all stripes: MDs, PhDs, ...), I've come to see jargon for what it is: a weakly typed pointer. It's exactly analogous to a struct of function pointers with a user cookie in C.

Jargon lets you summarize whole concepts in one word. A lot of jargon is functional in the math/programming sense: you can pass 'arguments' to the jargon. The jargon adds levels of abstraction that let the users communicate faster, with less error, and higher precision.

For instance, the distinction between civil and criminal matters; or the distinction between malfeasance, misdemeanor, and felony.

[mywittyname]

> Lawyers especially give me the impression that they use jargon to obscure their field from regular folks.

Really? You think that lawyers (and physicians) use Latin/Greek words in order to confuse regular folks?

These fields are very old, and changing the meaning of something Mens Rea or lateral malleolus is going to require A) an exact drop-in replacement which will probably just as obscure, B) retraining of an entire set of people.

Our field is similar in that we have a mountain of jargon that's largely inaccessible to regular folks. The point of those words are not to converse with regular folks but to convey information to others in the field with as little ambiguity as possible.

[tomatocracy]

In England many Latin terms were replaced with English terms in 1998 with the adoption of the new Civil Procedure Rules in an effort to make justice "more accessible" (alongside other reforms). These arguably actually added confusion - for example it's much more obvious that a "writ" is a specialist term versus "claim" which replaced it.

[msla]

Or ask a non-mathematician what a ring, a field, and a group are.

[titzer]

It's about cognitive load. The more jargon diverges from concepts you already have learned and used for years, the more difficult it is to adapt. As an experiment, try replacing all of your variable names and types with numbered variables: v1, v2, v3, etc. Then compare to replacing them with words: not completely random words, but with completely misleading words, like the complete opposite of what they represent, length/height, mass/speed, etc. You'll find the latter is maddeningly hard to deal with, because your brain keeps bringing a whole lot of context that is just wrong, so you are constantly fighting your own brain.

Intuitive things come from prior experience. They are a kind of inertia that you just have to work with.

[greggyb]

Jargon that builds on intuition can be its own problem. Jargon, by its very definition, has explicit technical meaning in a specific domain. Intuition in words is based on vernacular usage. It is vanishingly unlikely that the vernacular usage aligns with the domain-specific usage of a given term. This leads to plenty of false assumptions, and forces people to disambiguate jargon-usage vs vernacular-usage, which may both be found in a single piece of writing.

See economics for a great example of jargon-vernacular crossover.

[titzer]

> Jargon that builds on intuition can be its own problem.

Sure it can, which is why you gotta be double-careful naming things and not try to take metaphors too far. A jargon term needs to crisply identify the crux of the concept and not confuse with irrelevant or misleading details.

[greggyb]

> A jargon term needs to crisply identify the crux of the concept and not confuse with irrelevant or misleading details.

Agreed. I've never seen a vernacular term fill this role well.

If you need to learn the technical concepts either way to be effective, might as well give them a name that doesn't conflict with another definition most people know.

[titzer]

I think "binary tree" is a decent example. It's not only a visual depiction of how the data structure is laid out, but the metaphor of "leaves" does also transfer over. It is possible to take it too far, trying to fit "bark" into the concept, which is of course, silly. Calling it a "dubranchion" or some such would be a disaster, IMHO.

[greggyb]

"Binary tree" is not a vernacular term.

In economics, "cost" is a good example. This is a distinct concept from "price". "Comparative advantage" is another term in economics; this is perhaps not used in vernacular conversation, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly doesn't convey to most people the definition understood by someone with an education in economics -- the vernacular reading doesn't imply the jargon definition.

It seems to me that the difference is how the jargon is used. I imagine that someone without a CS background would quickly realize, when overhearing a conversation about binary trees, that the subject is something other than a type of flora.

I can tell you with confidence borne from frustrating experience that using economics jargon, such as that I mentioned above, with a lay audience gives the audience no such impression that the terms mean anything other than what they perceive them to mean.

[josephg]

Good variable names (and type names) matter for legibility. They should be clear, unambiguous, short, memorable and suggestive. Unambiguous is usually more important than short and memorable.

The word 'long' is ambiguous and unmemorable. And the type "word" is actively misleading. If you called a variable or class 'long', it wouldn't pass code review. And for good reason.

'Power' is an excellent example of what good technical terms look like. "Power" has a specific technical meaning in each of those fields, but in each case the technical meaning is suggested by the everyday meaning of the word "power". Ask a non-physicist to guess what "power" means in a physics context and they'll probably get pretty close. Ask a non-programmer to guess what "integer" means in programming and they'll get close. Similarly computing words like "panic", "signal", "file", "output", "stream", "motherboard" etc are great terms because they all suggest their technical meaning. You don't have to understand anything about operating systems to have an intuition about what "the computer panicked" means.

Some technical terms you just have to learn - like "GPU" or "CRDT". But at least those terms aren't misleading. I have no problem with the term "double precision floatingpoint" because at least its specific.

"long", "double", "short" and "word" are bad terms because they sound like you should be able to guess what they mean, but that is a game you will lose. And to make matters worse, 'long', 'double' and 'short' are all adjectives in the english language, but used in C as nouns[1]. They're the worst.

[1] All well named types are named after a noun. This is true in every language.

[bregma]

"long" and "short" are adjectives in C. The types are "long int" and "short int" and the "int" is implied if it's not present. A declaration like

    auto long sum;

Declares a variable named "sum" of type "long int" and of automatic storage duration.

The "double" comes from double-precision floating point. In the 1970s and 1980s anyone who came near a computer would know what that meant. Anyone who ever had to use a log table or slide rule (which was anyone doing math professionally) would know exactly what that meant.

There are good sound reasons for the well-chosen keywords. Just because one is ignorant of those reasons does not mean they were not good choices.

[_kst_]

Well, you can certainly think of "long" and "short" as adjectives, but the grammar doesn't treat them that way.

"long", "short", "signed", "unsigned", "int", "float", and "double" are all type specifiers. The language specification includes an exhaustive list of the valid combinations of type specifiers, including which ones refer to the same type. The specifiers can legally appear in an order. For example, "short", "signed short", and "int short signed", among others, all refer to the same type. (They're referred to as "multisets" because "long" and "long long" are distinct.)

[flohofwoe]

You really need to consider the context before making broad statements like this.

By your own standards, "word" and "long (word)" are actually excellent terms, because they're conventions used by the underlying hardware, and using the same conventions absolutely makes sense for a programming language that's close to the hardware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture)