From: "David A. Black" Date: 2005-12-07T01:19:08+09:00 Subject: Re: Subclassing Class. Hi -- On Wed, 7 Dec 2005 gwtmp01@mac.com wrote: > > On Dec 6, 2005, at 10:11 AM, David A. Black wrote: > > That may be due to restraint on the part of people who prefer other > > terms > > than "eigenclass" but don't think there should be a > > "vote"-by-pre-emptive-usage contest in this area. > > Isn't that pretty much how all new jargon comes into being, by being > used? Even in academic papers you'll see words and phrases coined > without a vote and if the semantics appeal to the community they will be > referenced and reused in another paper until they become part of the > standard nomenclature. I know -- I've done it myself. I've never hesitated to use neologisms in my own academic work, and if people find them helpful, they can use them. If not, they're just something I came up with to help explain some concept. This is different. First of all, Ruby is a work by Matz, not any of us. But, granting that single authorship is not really the whole story here, there's no vacuum for "eigen/virtual/meta/single/adhoc"-class to fill anyway. There's some fragility in the existing terms, but they do exist, and the fragility is being examined carefully by Matz with community input. What is the benefit of short-circuiting that process? And let's say your model does apply. That means -- as in common speech and academic discourse -- that different groups of people will use different jargon for the same things. We'll have the eigenclass people, the metaclass people, and so on. And newcomers will have to learn about all of them, so that they can talk to everyone. I think, among other things, that there's a limit to how tolerant people are going to be of being expected to wallow in all this meta-meta-culture. It's certainly not what attracted me to Ruby. > I do understand that new terms can be confusing and, unlike a refereed > paper, most posters don't have footnotes to define all their terms, but > new terms will continue to emerge (e.g., Ajax) spontaneously. > > The Ruby community is very fortunate to have Matz to sift through all > the suggestions, RCRs, code, and discussion and provide a certain amount > of guidance, but that doesn't preclude other sources of inspiration (I > hope). How about channeling these inspirations *through* the RCRs and discussions? I just can't see how throwing arbitrarily many home-made synonyms for language-level constructs at newcomers can be of the slightest benefit. In the short term I suppose it's exhilerating and makes people feel creative and participatory. But that's > The big elephant in the room seems to be Matz comments that the > semantics of a meta/singleton/eigen class might be implemented via some > mechanism other than a class, which would certainly stir the pot a bit. No elephant, from my perspective. That's yet another reason (aside from the general principle of respect for Matz's unique role) for not having the terminology free-for-all. David __ David A. Black dblack@wobblini.net "Ruby for Rails", forthcoming from Manning Publications, April 2006!