Currying

My critique of your original post is that you're treating English like it's a computer language where words mean very specific things. But the reality is that English is a cobbled-together bunch of words with imprecise meanings that arise from common usage. Let me reiterate: usage determines meaning, not the other way around.

You're approaching this conversation with your own preconceived notions about what the words mean and trying to force your preconceived notions onto everyone else instead of trying to understand what the other person means. It's a rude way to treat people trying to communicate with you.

I mean, it's clear that you understand the idea because you're coming up with examples that show that you understand it. Communication was successful. There's no problem with the communication. The problem is that you decided, after communication was successful, to force your preferred usage of the words on other people.

This is an extremely common interpersonal mistake that technical people make because unlike English, computer languages have very specific, objective meanings. But expecting that same objective specificity from humans speaking English isn't realistic, kind, or polite. It's one of the main reasons technical people are widely perceived as socially inept. Behaving like this hurts our careers, friendships, and romantic relationships. Doing this on HN is just a minor annoyance to everyone else, but if you do this in your life as a whole, the person you're harming most is yourself, because you're making it a pain in the ass to communicate with you.

I'm asking you to be a better reader and listener.

And look, maybe you can get skybrian or me to change the way we communicate to suit your preferences, but why? Nothing is gained. And if you spend your life trying to force people to communicate a certain way instead of trying to understand people, it's just going to be an endless war, where the only meaningful result you'll achieve is that it's harder for people to communicate with you. Is that what you want for yourself?

If you'd approached this from the perspective of "hey I think people would understand you better if you said it this other way", that would be fine. I think it's great to improve communication, and it's both up to speaker/writer and listener/reader to meet in the middle: both sides of this interaction can improve. But that's a pretty big difference between coming at someone like "you're wrong".

No, because this is an informal conversation not a mathematical paper.

Clearly you understand what is meant if someone says that subtraction is a subset of addition. You also clearly understand they're not saying it as a statement of proof.

If you can understand someone well enough to correct their usage of words, you understand them well enough that they communicated successfully. So why create a problem?

> Listen, currying is a defined term[0], as is partial application[1]. Those are primarily mathematic definitions, and your choice of words "...is a subset of..." is also stemming from a rather mathematical terminology if you'd ask me. Therefor its interpretation will primarily be itching logical intelligence.

Yes, I'm well aware, I just don't care. People use words outside their dictionary definitions all the time and if we understand it, it doesn't matter.

Perhaps you should look up the word pedant? Dictionary authors are well aware of the pitfalls of relying on definitions as prescription rather than description.

> I'm not going to discuss visual, linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal or naturalistic understandings with you on Hacker News about your intentions,

Well, that's your prerogative, but I'll note that you haven't said anything interesting about currying because you keep assuming your audience knows less than they do. Learning to listen at an adult level would help you to have more interesting technical discussions, too.