1. whorfian mind lock
[from the Lojban-language list] 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.
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Definitions of whorfian mind lock
