51–60 of 61 posts
I really love this, it’s what I want to see in HN. But I can’t resist joining the pointless debate: - A primarily cooked dish, particularly if it is cooked all together or is served warm, is definitely not a salad. - An “untossed salad” is definitely not a salad. - English speaking people add the term “salad” to a bunch of concoctions that are definitely not salads.
- few things are better than a blue cheese wedge salad.
I really love this, it’s what I want to see in HN. But I can’t resist joining the pointless debate: - A primarily cooked dish, particularly if it is cooked all together or is served warm, is definitely not a salad. - An “untossed salad” is definitely not a salad. - English speaking people add the term “salad” to a bunch of concoctions that are definitely not salads.
> An “untossed salad” is definitely not a salad. I definitely agree, but grandfathering in this specific exception suggests a definition variant: a salad can be mixed and shuffled (possibly from an ordered initial state), and in this case it remains a salad; it isn't damaged, and on the contrary it usually improves (typically by increasing the entropy of solid component positions and distributing liquid condiments mo…
Part of the appeal of the wedge salad is the crispiness of the lettuce. So if you improve it with more thorough mixing, you'd have to consume it immediately before the crisp is lost. I don't think this is incompatible, just a nuance.
This becomes more obvious with a layered salad -- layered salads seem designed to keep ingredients separate in the presentation container, but get mixed together in the transition to the plate or dipper.
Salads are dishes without a fixed structure. You can randomly rearrange the ingredients without changing it into another dish. For example, a pizza is salad on top of dough, a burger is salad between buns, and a burrito is salad wrapped in a tortilla. But as a whole, pizzas, burgers, and burritos each have a strict, defined structure, so they aren't salads, they just contain a salad component. Additionally, anything…
pedantry/ˈped(ə)ntrē/ Pedantry is an excessive, boastful, or annoying focus on minor details, formal rules, and trivial points of learning.
It's a bit funny that I can replace "pedantry" with "mathematics" here and it still makes sense: Mathematics is an excessive, boastful, or annoying focus on minor details, formal rules, and trivial points of learning.
Sufficiently advanced Pedantry is indistinguishable from Mathematics
I really love this, it’s what I want to see in HN. But I can’t resist joining the pointless debate: - A primarily cooked dish, particularly if it is cooked all together or is served warm, is definitely not a salad. - An “untossed salad” is definitely not a salad. - English speaking people add the term “salad” to a bunch of concoctions that are definitely not salads.
- warm potato salads are better than cold ones. - few things are better than a blue cheese wedge salad.
- A wedge salad is right on the edge. It's a traditional salad except that the lettuce leaves are not separated. But if it was anything else in that form factor, like replacing the lettuce wedge with a potato, that's not a salad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
- warm potato salads are better than cold ones. - few things are better than a blue cheese wedge salad.
- I'm of the perhaps controversial opinion that a potato salad is not a salad, particularly a warm one. - A wedge salad is right on the edge. It's a traditional salad except that the lettuce leaves are not separated. But if it was anything else in that form factor, like replacing the lettuce wedge with a potato, that's not a salad.
I'm absolutely horrified by the way kids use "literally", but that definition has achieved critical mass and must be included in the dictionary.
The insistence on a single definition is where the silliness of the original article comes into play. There are obviously multiple definitions of salad; you don't have to accept all of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
- I'm of the perhaps controversial opinion that a potato salad is not a salad, particularly a warm one. - A wedge salad is right on the edge. It's a traditional salad except that the lettuce leaves are not separated. But if it was anything else in that form factor, like replacing the lettuce wedge with a potato, that's not a salad.
The meaning of a word doesn't care what your opinion is. Enough people believe a potato salad is a salad that it has to be contained within one of the definitions for salad. I'm absolutely horrified by the way kids use "literally", but that definition has achieved critical mass and must be included in the dictionary. The insistence on a single definition is where the silliness of the original article comes into play.…
If one attempts to have a single definition stretched over all the meanings, then you indeed get a definition that is way too broad that includes soups and sandwiches, which is ludicrous. But it's quite common for a single word to have multiple senses, let's just go with that.
I think you can imagine a situation where you end up with a table named "Salad" (or "Salads", or maybe even "SALADS" if you're nasty). Perhaps you're building a database application for a restaurant or grocery store, or some sort of meal planner or nutrition tracker.
Salads are obviously Distinctly Different Things than Meats, Dairy, and Drinks, so those are separate tables. Except, invariably, you run into the exact pointless arguments being made in this article: you cannot actually define the boundaries of a salad, because, like almost every noun, "salad" is an address in conceptual space. It's a way of summoning a group of ideas into a conversation so that you can communicate, not a way of Doing Exact Math as CSMastermind eloquently pointed out in another comment. You can start at this address and adjust it with modifiers like "fruit" or "Caesar". You can move arbitrarily far: "I had a fruit salad for dinner, except the fruit was all fermented and smooshed up into a bottle. It was wine. I had wine for dinner."
So you end up with records that are kinda-salads and you don't know what table to put them in, and you also end up with wanting to say a whole bunch of the same things about Salads that you want to say about Pizzas and Sodas too. So you end up with both poor cohesion and high duplication. Your tables mostly share the same 12 columns and you don't know where to look for things.
"But I would never make a 'Salads' table," you say, "that's far too specific!". But you do: you make an Employee table, or a PcrTest table, or an ElectricalSubstation table. Or perhaps those should be more general: "Meal", or "Person", or "Analysis", or "Facility"! But now your SELECT results look like a checkerboard of NULLS and real values as the sub-definitions show up anyway. And even then, you still run into cases that somehow don't fit: we're making a lot of these kinds of Facilities, so we want it in the Facility table, but it's not a real facility, it's a template facility! You've weakened your definitions for not much gain.
And all of this is assuming you already know everything about the domain, but you don't! You're exploring, discovering, iterating, beta testing, pivoting. You make database tables by identifying the nouns that your SMEs use when the SMEs themselves can't fully define them, and then you get annoyed at the inalienable property of language that it is resistant to strict definitions, and briefly wonder whether we'd all be better off speaking Lojban. Then you wonder about abandoning this restrictive idea of "schema" and go NoSQL or key/value, until you realize that you still have a schema, it's just now no longer enforced or supported, and you go back to relational SQL with a few remaining key/value pair systems still jammed in here and there.
So you start from faulty assumptions, make choices you don't need to be making, develop an inflexible design, and end up having pointless arguments like the one in this article -- except instead of being recreational lunchtime arguments, they are ones that determine the failure or success of your business.
Stop defining tables based on the first nouns you encounter. Nouns do not work that way. You will never be able to define them. Instead, define tables based on statements you want to make about your entities. Every time you come across something you want to write down -- a person's name, a place's address, nutritional information, a SKU -- find a table for that. Keep things cohesive: Full Name and Address don't belong together, because many things have one but not the other. Stop trying to decide whether a given entity is a "Person" or an "Employee" or a "Salad" or a "Facility": you don't need to care! All you need to know is what you want to say about it.
This has a ton of design implications that could easily fill a textbook, but it does work. You can actually have a flexible database design that isn't full of NULL checkboards and the same 12 columns in every table. But you do have relegate these pointless Salad Theory-type arguments to the lunch hour, because you'll instead find yourself talking about actual useful things during design meetings.
I’m fine with their first consideration: > A salad must be a mixture of greens. The only additional realization you need is that things like “fruit salad” and “chicken salad” are using the word “salad” figuratively . There’s no reason to expect our definition of “salad” to cover figurative usage. After all, do you really expect to cover, for instance, “word salad”?
>After all, do you really expect to cover, for instance, “word salad”? This is covered further down in the article where it's pointed out that one of the Merriam-Webster definitions is >" A usually incongruous mixture : HODGEPODGE " The author points out that Merriam-Webster actually has a looser definition of salad than they do, because the article is only considering edible things to count. Also, I disagree - I don…
I mean "figurative" in the typical sense: describing a thing using a word for a different thing in order to suggest a similarity between the two things. A fruit salad is fruit arranged similarly to how vegetables are arranged in a salad. A fruit pizza is a dish with a crust that looks similar to a pizza crust, topped with frosting and fruit in a way that evokes how pizza is topped with sauce, cheese, etc.