this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 0 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Fruit the botanical term and fruit the culinary term are just not the same word. Similarly to how theory means something different in science and in colloquial speech. That's just how language works.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 0 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.

My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.

[–] SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org 0 points 10 hours ago

I always thought it was more like overloading, but namespaces are also a good analogy.

[–] jaupsinluggies@feddit.uk 0 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, but then where would we be without all those endless squabbles about X which are easily solved by pointing out that A::X != B::X?

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 0 points 13 hours ago

We’d all be sitting on the back porch, enjoying an ice cold ginger beer at the end of long summer day!

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 5 hours ago

I like this.

Kids are already taught to look for "context clues"

Namespacing would require the author explicitly define the namespace.

I would also add versioning as a year/month and localization.