Am Do., 8. Okt. 2020 um 20:34 Uhr schrieb Adam Nelson <xxxxxx@nels.onl>:
>
> This is starting to sound like prescriptivism vs. descriptivism in language... I can be sympathetic to prescriptivism at times, but in software I think that there's value in the principle of least surprise, which is fundamentally descriptivist. If developers are already familiar with a certain usage of a term, to use the same term in an unfamiliar way for the sake of correctness in a different context (e.g., mathematics or logic) accomplishes little beyond adding another "gotcha" when learning a language or switching between languages.
>
> (Incidentally, I wonder if this is a cultural difference between English-speakers and German-speakers. English is generally considered a descriptivist language because no authority decides what is valid English; the language evolves with common usage. But German has had prescriptive spelling reforms adopted by governments.)

It's an intriguing idea, but I don't think that this is related.
Questions of orthography are quite different from questions of meaning
or terminology.*

The reason is probably more social. I am a mathematician and I do a
lot of teaching and I have to teach and explain hard stuff. If I have
learned anything then that preciseness and terminology matter a lot to
make even complicated things understandable. Whether you have to learn
a huge vocabulary (which you have to in maths) is not important (or
makes a big difference). What is important is coherence and
regularity.

Anyway, if you want to use established terms, "vectorlist" in another
candidate (akin to Java's ArrayList), which expresses the concept
quite well, which is not misleading and not a new surprising term.

Marc

--
* In the social sciences and in the humanities where you write a lot,
the choice of the language probably matters. I heard of at least one
native English speaker who wrote his scientific texts in German
because he thought that this language was more expressive for his
ideas.