[KevinH]

FWIW, as everybody noted and that is evidently clear, miscommunication is the bane of IT support! The problem is that English words (any language really) are imprecise with many possible interpretations and meanings and what seems perfectly clear to one party is gobbledy-gook to the other and visa-versa.

This is why the true language of math and its supporting notation were developed (speaking as a just retired programmer and analytics/stats prof here!) because English words (even seemingly well defined) were simply not precise enough.

The problem with teaching stats to students was that only one party understood the precise notation that most text books used and so my professor role really reduced to being that of a translator back to English with the hopes of still trying to be precise via lots of examples. That was not always fruitful and most people only learned things by rote and even more unfortunately good thinking (the forest) was typically lost in trees!


To make matters worse, the overlap of domains of IT and English are less well structured than math and almost impossible to pin down (leaving lawyers as the only winners!).

For IT/software, the advent of rapid protyping has helped, but obviously not fixed the issues.