Comments on: It all comes down to respecting levels of abstraction

By: Jonathan Boccara

Jonathan Boccara — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 11:46:00 +0000

In reply to Tobias Locker. Indeed, fixed. Thanks Tobias!

By: Tobias Locker

Tobias Locker — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 10:56:00 +0000

“…Calling it “getName” would mix several abstraction levels together…” My guess is it should be “getMap” here.

By: Jonathan Boccara

Jonathan Boccara — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 13:15:00 +0000

In reply to Jesse Silverman.

Jesse, this is a very encouraging piece of feedback!
I’m eager to learn idioms and expressions, and to improve my English, and I’m very grateful that you took the time to explain this to me. I went and replaced every occurence of concision in the text by conciseness, to follow your advice. Don’t hesitate if you see other things that should be clarified.
Thank you very much for your feedback, I really appreciate it.

By: Jesse Silverman

Jesse Silverman — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 15:12:00 +0000

I love this blog. I have often thought that C++ is the sort of complex topic that deserves to be learned primarily from books, and that blogs were way too informal to be an important part of one’s C++ diet, however, Fluent C++ seems to be one of the exceptions.
One of the more important ones, because several others are great if one is already an expert, but not so much for intermediate individuals….

Your English is generally superb, however, I wonder if you are aware of the connotation of the difference between concision and conciseness. There are many -cision words that are every day words, including of course, precision, decision, incision and maybe some others, but the “plain, everyday” word for terseness, brevity, keeping it concise in English is just conciseness. I found that etymonline.com agreed with my intuitive thoughts on this:

conciseness (n.)
“brevity of statement, expression of much in few words,” 1650s, from concise + -ness.

[Conciseness] is the English word familiar to the ordinary man: concision is the LITERARY CRITIC’S WORD, more recent in English, used by writers under French influence & often requiring the reader to stop & think whether he knows its meaning. [Fowler]

Certainly concision is more erudite and scholarly, but it is also somewhat more abstruse, and sticking with conciseness might be preferable in terms of expressiveness for those not of a literary bent.

I have now made the most long-winded comment on the use of conciseness versus concision in the history of the English language.

The more important point may just be that I love your blog and think it is already influential and may become even more so, which is why using the best or most widely understood terms to describe things fits in with the topic of this post.

By: Jonathan Boccara

Jonathan Boccara — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 11:04:00 +0000

In reply to Yavor. Amazing. Glad that it was useful for you Yavor!

By: Yavor

Yavor — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 06:55:00 +0000

Great post! Thanks for taking the time to share 🙂

I have never heard of that particular principle. I really liked that you supply us with the questions to ask (WHAT vs. HOW) to reason about our code.

I will be reading more from your site for sure *thumbs up*