Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Text, for me, is made of words. Or letters. Not "strings." When I think about it, I realize why the term "strings" is used; "words" and "characters" aren't specific and accurate enough. But that doesn't change the fact that an explanation of a geek term written in other geek terms is still opaque. I get that simplifying the explanation, or using layman's terms for the details, would be inaccurate; that doesn't make it any easier to understand.
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The big problem isn't so much understanding as it is specificity. People who are writing documentation generally want to do it right, and
right means both accurate and precise. (by the way, this is general, not Elfwreck-specific) What I find bizarre is the way some people limit their refusal to learn terms to computer technology only. For example, I knew someone who refused to use the terms "monitor" and "keyboard" and insisted on saying "computer TV set" and "typewriter" and would pretend not to understand if someone else didn't use that terminology -- yet this same person memorized the Latin names of innumerable plants (he wasn't a botanist; this was a hobby) and used them in preference to their common names, and insisted that other people should learn them too because they were more accurate (which is true, but not much use to someone who only knows that white thing as a daisy). Any time we learn to use a new technology, we learn the terms that go with it. We learn that we cook in frying pans, not flat-hot-things, and our cars have gearshifts and brakes, and our sewing machines have presser feet, and the birds outside my window are eating suet out of a suet basket. But somehow, people seem to think that this is unnecessary for computers and software. Just like knowing that a car has an accelerator and a brake, not a go-pedal and a stop-pedal, we need to learn what the computer things we're dealing with are called.
Going back to what Elfwreck said about text being made of words: Is the phone number
(123)-456-7890 text? How about the postal code
K1A 0H8? Or the ISBN
0307454541?I wouldn't call those words, since they're not something I could pronounce, but they
are text. They're strings. They're strings that do not include words. From the point of view of someone working with regular expressions, it's just as likely (if not more so) that you might need to apply the regex to a phone number or, in the case of calibre, an ISBN, than just ordinary words. So they say "string" instead of "words" because that covers everything. If someone talked about regexes being useful for dealing with words, there would be the question "Is there something like a regex I can use to look up this ISBN, then?"
Unless we want to go around calling a monitor a "computer TV set" (and probably a different term for every person), we have to agree on some pre-defined set of terms. That's what we've done with cars and cows, pans and plows, all throughout history. Computers and software are no different.
It's not like learning terminology is hard. Humans are set up for that sort of thing. Do you know the parts of a book? There's a cover, sometimes with a dust jacket, there are pages which may be fixed in signatures, there's a spine, page numbers, perhaps a table of contents and an index, and so on. How about your house? You know it has stairs and windows, and the windows are made up of panes fixed in sashes, possibly divided by mullions, and they're made of glass, maybe double-glazed. That bird I'm looking at has a beak, feathers, feet, a crest, a gray back and pale breast, and I could go into much more detail to a fellow birdwatcher. There's nothing more arcane about what "regex" means than what "wingbar" means, and it's something you need to know if you're going to be dealing with that category of things.
That's what I find so ridiculous about people trying to claim that a specialty's precise terminology (and it's almost always computer-related) serves as some kind of shibboleth to keep out the uninitiated. Terminology is the
easy stuff. If I just had to talk the talk, I could pass myself off as a professional athlete or an airframe and powerplant mechanic, given a little time to study up on the proper words. I couldn't actually play a good game of rugby or fix your airplane, but if I just had to understand what people were saying and sound like I knew what I was talking about, that would be easy.
So, back to the topic at hand, what we need isn't to translate technical terms into "computer TV set"-speak for users; we need to provide adequate explanations of those technical terms so they can understand what other documentation means, and use the terms themselves. That gets everyone on the same page. Perhaps a glossary section of some kind could address this.