[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.