An Adjective is a Noun is a Verb

In my earlier blog entry about Russell's Theory of Descriptions, it gave the example of rewording "The present king of France is bald" into a special descriptive form. You may have noticed in that discussion that the phrase "X is kingly" was used instead of a more natural sounding "X is a king". This is because Russell was attempting, via his special form of making statements, to remove all implicit claims that X exists, to be replaced with mere descriptions of X.

Programmers should think of this as the difference between:

"(x instanceof King) && x.bald && x.french"

versus

"select * from AllThingsTable where french='Y' and bald='Y' and kingly='Y'".

The former would blow up in Java with a null pointer exception if X didn't exist, whereas the latter in SQL would not blow up; it would merely return zero results meaning that none exist.

In philosophy, nouns are reworked into adjectives and even verbs all the time to make statements more precise. In Russell's template, nouns are reworked into adjectives. In process philosophy (where everything is considered a "process" rather than a "thing"), a "king" would really be considered the process of "kinging".

Lest all this awkward wordsmithing seem too artificial, a quick look at McWorter's video introduction to linguistics[1] will show that what seems natural to us, is English specific. He gives the example of "I like Pam", where "like" is a verb, but in Japanese, the equivalent "Pam ga suki" literally means "Pam likeableness". So, a concept in one language may naturally be an activity, but in another language, it's a noun form of an adjective.

[1] Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language, John McWhorter
- http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=2270&pc=Social%20Sciences

- Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language (Parts 1-3) DVDS & Guidebook 

XistP is the abbreviation for Existential Programming

After having written many blog posts, essays, emails, etc, etc using the phrase "Existential Programming", it is getting pretty tedious to keep spelling it out.  An official abbreviation is needed!

Unfortunately for me, XP is already taken for "Extreme Programming".  XSP is taken TWICE!
Once by Apache for eXtensible Server Pages, and also for an ASP.Net server implementation. XIST is the name of an RNA gene, XSTP is the eXtended Satellite Transport Protocol, xISP/XISP/Xisp is used for all sorts of things, ...

...so, the not so short (but shorter than the whole phrase) XistP is my choice for the official abbreviation for Existential Programming.

A rose is a rose is (not) a rose

In several of my earlier blog entries, there was discussion as to whether words like "rose" have meanings, or are only references to things. Shakespeare thought they were only references to things when he wrote "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet". My conclusion to the contrary (based on "salt") has been given empirical evidence, as described in a story on National Public Radio[1].

Lera Boroditsky, an assistant psychology professor at Stanford University, had conducted experiments in which people were shown to be unconsciously affected by the language they spoke when they described things. In languages like German and Spanish that have "gender", each noun (unlike English) is either male, female, or neuter. However, languages aren't consistent with regard to the gender of any particular word. In German, the word for bridge is feminine, and in Spanish it is masculine. When test subjects were asked to provide words describing a picture of a bridge, the Germans came up with fragile, elegant, beautiful, peaceful, slender, and pretty, whereas the Spaniards came up with strong, dangerous, long, sturdy, big, and towering. Even when the test subjects were taught a completely made up language that had gender, they chose descriptions of things that matched the gender of the made up word for that thing.

So, when doing the business and technical analysis of systems, be aware of attached connotations and concept interrelationships before translating rich natural language words like Salary into antiseptic variable names like Foo.

[1] "Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong", Robert Krulwich

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102518565