Whorfian mind-lock

Software designs are often restricted in unavoidable ways by the capacities
of the operating system or hardware they have to work with. Sometimes they
are restricted in avoidable ways by mental habits a developer has picked up
from a particular language or environment (perhaps a now-obsolete one) and
never discarded. When a design develops complications that are the result of
a mental habit that is no longer adaptive, the developer has succumbed to
Whorfian mind-lock. The design itself has been whorfed. For example, some
Unix designs are whorfed by the assumption that directory searches are
linear and expensive for large directories; therefore directories must be
kept small. Another common way to succumb to Whorfian mind-lock is to do
serial processing with a small working set rather than slurping an entire
file or data structure into memory; the hidden assumption here is that not
much core is available and virtual memory works poorly if at all. Detecting
Whorfian mind-lock is important, because it tends to introduce unnecessary
complexity and bugs.

