Technical Writing: Fruit Apple Banana vs X Y Z

On Technical Writing of Object Oriented Programing

xah's thoughts extempore, episode №201311171455

the most idiotic tutorial idiom in OOP is using Fruits, banana, apple, analogy, or using Shapes, circle, square.

Why? because, when you read those english words, your head started to nod, but you actually understood nothing. You think you understand, but when pressed with details, you wouldn't be able to answer a fart.

So, instead of using fruits, apple, thingy, use abstract symbols, x, y, z, math, that is.

That is the beauty of math, and that's also why math is like that.

because, in order to truly understand, you want to get rid of irrelevancies. Analogy sometimes helps, but often just confound and mislead.

btw, Category theory, is analogy codified; the math of analogy, called, isomorphism.

try this. Pick a tutorial of OOP language you don't know a thing. Find the chapter on class/object. Find/replace in code examples of words like fruit/shapes to x, y, z. Now, try to read the code.

Here is my claim. Of those who read fruit/shapes, they will understand less about the lang than those who tried to read the xyz version. And this can be verified by a test. e.g. ask them to create a new class or object, decide what's the inheritance, etc.

[google plus discussion https://plus.google.com/+XahLee/posts/WCueTq3RixN]