My experience in software development in teams is that the vocabulary used is absolutely essential to the two programmers discussing their current issue of interfacing with each other. Whether other programmers use the same word or not isn’t significant to them; they are not writing programs to be readable until possibly after the said programs actually work. So the problem is already solved before any ontology is used, dictated, or agreed to. Then there’s time to adjust words to fit some manager’s choice of vocabulary, but that is AFTER the problem of a working program has already been solved.
And what about the situation when program A was written 30 years ago to support a nuclear power plant, the writer of which has since died, and the writer of the second programme now has to write interfaces to programs needed to decommission that nuclear power plant over the next 20 years.
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Matthew West
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