Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

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I suppose it's not so easy to rectify the names we find in computing. It's a highly abstract field and also relatively young. It's really hard to come up with names for concepts which don't actually exist yet. We ended up with terse jargon at best and generic, sometimes incorrect names at worst. I think Scheme is the language with the cleanest symbol names and even in that language we find aggravating abbreviations such as the true and false symbols, all the different equality procedures and other historical Lisp jargon.

In science and medicine people seem to just make up new words using latin or greek roots. Things are often named after the people who discovered them. It's very inconsistent. Any attempts to fix it by introducing better names inevitably results in the new generation having to know all of the names. Some professors will even quiz students on obscure names nobody cares about anymore.

I wonder how mathematicians, physicists and engineers come up with names...

Mathematicians are happy to make up names from words with little or no comprehensible connection to the concept, such as Ring, Field, Magma, Group. That, or they name things after people, which is equally impenetrable. Doctors and biologists either name something after people, too, or create a Lego-word out of Classical roots which more-or-less describes it.

I wish it were (more) acceptable to use made up words, like medicine does. Once you know the base morphemes in greek/latin, it's really easy to decode medical jargon. You'd need to augment the list with a bunch of technical terms of course.

It would be cool to have a tiny vocab (a la Toki Pona) of say 256 single-syllable morphemes of 1-2 consonants and 1-2 vowels.

SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstance -> Haplefaesthamon

Of course this is probably appealing to conlangers and language nerds, and horrifying to everyone else.

My father was a linguist. He one time suggested that I program in Lojban, as the logical aspect of it would be much easier to understand than the symbol-soup he perceived in what I was using.

He meant well.

Maybe the long name is a clue this monstrosity simply shouldn't exist?

The problem is not the number of letters used, but the number of ideas attached to one identifier.

> It would be cool to have a tiny vocab (a la Toki Pona) of say 256 single-syllable morphemes of 1-2 consonants and 1-2 vowels.

I'm sure the Urbit people will be by to explain that this is being worked on for Hoon, and email me now and I'll get you set up with a planet.

Actually making compound words works in many natural languages by itself. It's just obscured in English due to its nature as a near-creole: it has lots of loan-words all over the place, so it's less obvious how you can mix-and-match. (And it's less obvious how the loan words themselves might have been mixed and matched in the first place)

In Greek, Latin, French it's much easier to make compound words already.

Dutch does it a bit too, and German is quite famous for it. People actually make up words on the spot, and other people can easily infer the meaning.

I learned this the hard way while training a natural language "AI". People just do it in their day-to-day use of those languages.

In any case, I don't think you need to make up new morphemes for English, it has too many already from all the languages it's been borrowing from. Drawing from the extant pool would be quite adequate for me!

> I wonder how mathematicians, physicists and engineers come up with names...

It might be outsiders view, but I feel like in their formalisms mathematicians fall back to single character "names" for lots of things, or maybe single character + subscript. That conveniently side-steps the issue of naming things, and I think it was what Dijkstra was referring to in his essay.

Additionally, within the scope of any one field or sub-field, you get a nice constant-factor boost by exploiting capital/lowercase, italics, bold-face, "chalkboard" font, etc. and usually that suffices. Anyone who has taken a linear algebra course instantly recognizes what I mean by "Solve Ax = b" in the appropriate context. And if I say "Solve Qx = b" you have even more information, etc.

Yes single letters but using greek, latin, fracture, small and capital. Only small fracture is rare though.

> I wonder how mathematicians, physicists and engineers come up with names...

Mathematicians simply name everything after Cauchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Aug...

Well engineers and physicists can get around the naming issue by being very verbose. If an idea requires concepts from 5 different words to properly express then usually the whole 5 word phrase becomes the accepted nomenclature. The exceptions are usually when the preexisting words contain really different alternate meanings.

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