Timeline for Should we update our site's policy against helping programmers choose names to use in their software?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| Feb 2, 2023 at 13:36 | comment | added | Andrew Leach Mod | I do agree that "What is the hypernym for..." assumes there is one, and it should not be for answerers to demonstrate that there isn't one if there isn't one. It's difficult to prove a negative. Questions of the form "What is the hypernym for..." should prove that there is at least a need for such a hypernym, at least by showing their commonality (eg "apples and oranges are both fruits from a tree"; "bank accounts and bank cards are both products offered by banks") — and doing that might actually come up something suitable like fruit or product. | |
| Jan 31, 2023 at 21:30 | comment | added | jsw29 | @FumbleFingers, that may be debatable (it would depend on how card is interpreted), but that debate belongs to the page on which the substantive question about bank cards has been posted. Whatever we think about the specifics of that question should not distract us from the general meta- question about the no-naming rule, that this page is supposed to be devoted to. | |
| Jan 31, 2023 at 18:53 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Notwithstanding You're comparing apples and oranges, there's no doubt that fruit is a perfectly good answer to What is the hypernym for apples and oranges? But What is the hypernym for bank accounts and bank cards? is more like What is the hypernym for chalk and cheese? | |
| Jan 31, 2023 at 16:27 | comment | added | jsw29 | @StuartF, whether 'requests for hypernyms are normally bad questions' is debatable, but even assuming, for the sake of argument that they are, that is an entirely different matter from the concerns about naming that this meta-question is about. As I say in the answer, any such questions 'may, of course, be subject to closing on the basis of some other rule, but then it is that rule that should be invoked, rather than the one about naming'. The no-naming rule should not be used as the reason for closing just because naming is somehow involved, if something else is the real reason. | |
| Jan 31, 2023 at 16:18 | history | edited | jsw29 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 31, 2023 at 9:43 | comment | added | Stuart F | It might be possible to rephrase in some cases, but requests for hypernyms are normally bad questions based on a misapprehension of how language works (it's not a tree of increasing specialization, it's a collection of words each of which are used in certain contexts). They are almost invariably badly written and against site rules for other reasons like no research. Saying "what's a hypernym of cheese and dogs?" is not going to get a good answer unless you explain why you think there's a hypernym, what you think it includes and excludes, and what sort of context you want to use it in. | |
| Jan 29, 2023 at 9:06 | comment | added | Andrew Leach Mod | However, it has been done before, more than once generalising a question from which the desired particular instance might be drawn. | |
| Jan 29, 2023 at 1:16 | comment | added | tchrist Mod | Given how “What would be a good name for a list of accounts and cards?” ≠ “What is the hypernym for bank accounts and bank cards?”, your would-be rewrite produces a completely different question from the one that was asked. It might help someone else, but there’s no reason to imagine that it would help this asker because that is not what they want to know. You can’t transform a request for a concrete naming recommendation from a particular programming context into an abstract ontological question and expect any good to come of this sleight of hand: no context means bad answers. | |
| Jan 28, 2023 at 23:13 | history | answered | jsw29 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |