19 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
19 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
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.
|
|
|