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Those aren't the worst offenders. I'm referring to curry, cadr, lambda, monad, etc.

But map is confusing: it's also a data structure. "Wait, does map() create a new key-value dictionary?" Filter and collect are okay. Reduce is pretty arcane but tolerable, but the actual operation feels intuitively closer to "categorize" or "group."

My point about math was cultural. Math seems to revel in having its own peculiar and often even domain specific (even within mathematics!) terms and symbols for things.



1. Map isn't "also a data structure", the data structure is a way to implement a mapping function. There is no conceptual difference between code and data (for an example, see http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cons#Not_technically_fundamen...)

2. cadr is relatively easy, if you know your assembly (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_and_cdr#Etymology) :-)

And math has locally defined terms because one cannot give every concept a unique short meaningful memorable name. That is no different in computer science, where 'integer' can include negative numbers or not, may or may not wrap around, can be any number of bits or potentially unlimited, may include minus zero, etc.


>> 2. cadr is relatively easy, if you know your assembly (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_and_cdr#Etymology) :-)

If you know IBM 704 assembly...


reduce (or fold) would be accumulate, certainly not categorize or group.




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