whorfian mind-lock

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.