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Re:Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian... by kbenson on Friday June 19, 2020 @02:07PM (#23577214)
This is a common dynamic in many areas. As applied to programming languages, you can consider it as either the language complexity (learning curve), or terseness of terms. In that context, it also becomes clear what the paper gets from using those terms, more accurate communication of the concepts in question, but to an reduced audience. An extreme example of this is APL. For APL programmers, a show APL program can communicate a concept to other APL programmers which is for the most part illegible to others. If the idea is to communicate to other APL programmers, little explanation might be needed. For you and I, comment explaining the gibberish we're seeing would be appreciated. But if the goal is for other APL programmers to read it (as in a code base of APL), then perhaps that comment is sometimes superfluous.

As a more direct example staying with the theme of computer science but using English communication, in the context of programming I can can use the term isomorphism and the subset of people I'm communicating to (or expecting to) will know what it means, or after looking it up likely quickly understand what I'm communicating. For a novice or non-programmer, that may be significantly less likely. Am I better off replacing the term isomorphism with "running the same code on the client and server" all over the place? It depends on my audience and goals.

So, what's the purpose of this paper? To be widely distributed to the general public, or to be spread between business and economics academics for further research and discussion? I suspect writing your academic papers to the lowest common denominator is a good way to get your ideas dismissed by peers, as it both takes them longer to wade through the extra (unnecessary, for them) words which are also less clear, as an oft-used community term will carry more meaning than is easily expressed by the words you can replace it with in usage in a sentence.

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