| The uncanny rapport I feel by reading "lazy Tuesday afternoon, visiting The Orange Website, self-consciously averting your eyes from the C compiler output in a nearby terminal" builds enough trust that I'm willing to pay attention to what John Earnest (IJ or RtG) has to say about this. He's a great writer. Naming things is hard. It's one of the 2 most difficult problems in CS, along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. Of course, in this context I mean "CS" as "Computer Science", not "CouchSurfing". For the K programming language, meanings are specifically defined. In the article: "The word “ordinal” can mean anything, but the composition << has exactly one meaning." That's fine for the K compiler, but not for Google Search, or grep. I use "<<" to mean a bit shift to the left, presumably because I was taught C in university. Unique names are more useful for addressing (e.g. IPV6) but common names are more memorable (e.g. a URL. Translators (e.g. DNS) can't be perfect when there's a one-to-many or many-to-one correlation, but they try their best. K does well to enforce structure, but in the process, makes it very hard for the programmer to find examples and other documentation. I guess that's why the language hasn't become as popular as other languages, whose syntax is sufficiently familiar to be legible and memorable but unique enough to be searchable. |