this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
1265 points (96.6% liked)

Science Memes

15729 readers
3370 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day 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.

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 20 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.

[–] jaupsinluggies@feddit.uk 6 points 1 day 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?

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

[–] SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago

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