if you’re doing math or computer science, remember that the most important considerations when naming something are intimidation and inaccessibility. you want a name that has nothing to do with what it refers to, is ungoogleable, and makes you sound really smart for knowing what it means. that’s why every concept in math is named after one of these things:

• a letter in a non-Latin alphabet (phi, pi, tau, epsilon, delta, aleph)
• a white man’s name (Mandelbrot set, Sierpinski triangle)
• one of the vaguest words in the English language (normal, function, value, set, natural, real)
• esoteric words that have nothing to do with what they’re naming (manifold, topology, matrix)
• made-up words that are designed to sound intimidating (idempotent, calculus, integral)

under no circumstances should you give a math concept an intuitive or approachable name. math is serious business and it’s important to make it hard to learn and scare beginners away

PID controllers are my favorite example of this. they are incredibly easy to understand and explain but try reading the Wikipedia article on them. yikes

@kasdeya Sadly, computer science inherited most of its awful terminology directly from math.

I still occasionally have a, "That can't be a real word," moment when learning new terminology and like 99% of the time I find out mathematicians invented it. And then I look up the definition and it's recursive, giving me at least one more word to go through the same process.

"What the heck is a monad? Oh, it's an endofunctor? What's an endofunctor? A function that maps a category to itself? What does that even mean?!"

@kasdeya my mind was blown the day I realized, that you only need one or two op amps to make a PID controller

@kasdeya@cryptid.cafe don't forget to name variables and structs using the same word!

@kasdeya one could also say the same about the entirety of fucking rationalism. .holy *fuck* rationalists suffer strongly from this.. mostly because 90% of them are math and CompSci theory nerds I think

@kasdeya

It is also vitally important that when referring to precise measurements of a figure, that you give them names which are easily conflated with one another, or correspond with pieces which are so conflated.

'Opposite' and 'Adjacent' are a fantastic example, as a figure in an empty space is not adjacent to anything else, and both sides are adjacent to the hypotenuse.

(Trigonometry annoys me.)

@kasdeya Naming stuff is incredibly hard, especially if it is so abstract one can easily discover new stuff.

From my perspective, this applies effectively everywhere where new stuff has to be named. Like, take a look at the products in a supermarket, and both the brands and many of the products have names with the same issues.

@kasdeya Tbh, what usually happens when people truly run out of names and don't bother anymore is "just numbering things". From that perspective, naming of standards is usually worse, as it's often just "standards org name + number", i.e. ISO, IETF, RFC documents and standards, etc.

@fogti yeah those are terrible I’m ngl. or like any chip that’s called something like 8086 or 6502 or something - you can’t get any information from that at all