2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Whorfian mind-lock
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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Software designs are often restricted in unavoidable ways by the capacities
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of the operating system or hardware they have to work with. Sometimes they
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are restricted in avoidable ways by mental habits a developer has picked up
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from a particular language or environment (perhaps a now-obsolete one) and
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never discarded. When a design develops complications that are the result of
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a mental habit that is no longer adaptive, the developer has succumbed to
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Whorfian mind-lock. The design itself has been whorfed. For example, some
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Unix designs are whorfed by the assumption that directory searches are
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linear and expensive for large directories; therefore directories must be
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kept small. Another common way to succumb to Whorfian mind-lock is to do
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serial processing with a small working set rather than slurping an entire
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file or data structure into memory; the hidden assumption here is that not
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much core is available and virtual memory works poorly if at all. Detecting
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Whorfian mind-lock is important, because it tends to introduce unnecessary
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complexity and bugs.
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