From: "James (ruby-talk)" <ruby@...>
Date: 2001-07-16T23:05:31+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:17923] Re: Rubygarden Poll

> 
> Congratulations to the 73 victors.  But I'm surprised that facet won.
> Actually, I never saw how the word facet could be applied to a code
> chunk/snippet/Walter.  A facet is an aspect of something; facets of
> Ruby are things like single inheritance, elegance, iterators, or open
> sourced-ness.  This, on the other hand:
> 
>    def greet
>      puts "Hello"
>    end
> 
> is not a facet of Ruby, in any sense of the word I can conjure up.
> 
> Here's a follow-up poll for the 73:  if you use the word "facet" to
> mean a chunk of code, what word do you use to mean "facet"?  :-)


This makes me wonder if using the word 'facet' to mean a code
snippet isn't going against 'the Ruby way', where things (ideally)
behave as you would ordinarily expect (i.e., principle of least surprise).

If someone says, "I have a web page with a list of Ruby facets", what
would a newcomer expect this to be?

I think there's a point where one can go too far trying to apply
a 'theme' to a topic matter ("If the language is named 'Ruby', then
we need to call every associated part by a gemological term.")
Unless there is a natural, obvious mapping, why impose an arbitrary
jargon?

Or, put another way, what's wrong with calling a chunk of code, or
a code snippet,  "chunk of code" or "code snippet"?

James