July blog post 2: The hardest problem in computer science (Patreon)

The hardest problem in computer science / fuzzy notepad

Part of the problem here is that we're not actually doing computer science. We're doing programming, with a wide variety (hundreds!) of imperfect languages with different combinations of features and restrictions. There are only so many words to go around, so the same names get used for vaguely similar features across many languages, and native speakers naturally attach their mother tongue's baggage to the jargon it uses.