On Wednesday 20 August 2008 2:13 pm, Michael Barr wrote:
I am NOT about to change a word that has apparently existed for over 50 years just because it is not particularly meaningful.
I am going to risk putting my two cents here and perhaps being rejected by the moderator. One of the reasons why a word may need to be changed even if it has existed for 50 years is to avoid confusion. For example in the book "Categories for Software Engineering" the author talks about the "social life" of a set being the other sets it talks to. For a long while this puzzled me, until it dawned on me that the idea that the author was using was that the origins of modern Object-Orientated Programming (ie C++, Java) started with SmallTalk. In SmallTalk, objects communicated with one another by sending messages; and so making an analogy with familiar concepts that programmers use "sets have a social life" because SW objects "talk" to each other by sending messages. Stated another way it is difficult to see how a (Mathematical) object is the same as a (Software) object. The latter gets created and destroyed as the object comes in and out of scope. Hence what does one do? When stated generically, does the word object mean a mathematical one (around 60 years old) or a software one (more widely used)? Nim.