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Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

I'm generally opposed to jargon in tech writing so the use of 'holotype' caused me to look it up. I'm not sure it works. For example, by the definition Hotmail should be the holotype instead of GMail, which would be the paratype. (if I'm reading it right, I am not a zoologist.)

How Hotmail changed Microsoft (and email) forever

https://seforum.se/2019/01/08/the-history-of-hotmail/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holotype

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratype

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Something rubs me the wrong way about unnecessarily obfuscated jargon for relatively simple concepts in web development. The term "isomorphic code" has been living rent free in my head for like a decade and it still drives me nuts.

Big Thesaurus Energy is a pox on clear communications.

It’s the reason I can’t get into DDD. Love the overall idea, hate the terminology with the fire of a thousand suns.

DDD is something that most shops arrive at naturally without having to force paradigms to fit.

Other shops dont arrive at it naturally and it is just friction all the time trying to apply a practice without groking it.

I've always felt that DDD is more of a meta-paradigm than a paradigm per-se, and shops that "arrive" at it have actually always been themselves examples of the practice in itself, as opposed to being instances of itself.

Sorry, I'm actually just bluffing, what is DDD?

Domain Driven Design

You got me there

The goofy thing is how quickly that term fell out of the vernacular, and how few people (other than you) even stop to be amazed at the ridiculousness of it all in hindsight.

At the time, it seemed rather earth-shattering to be programming in the same language on both the front-end and the back-end without a browser plug-in or applet. The possibilities such an arrangement opened up seemed potentially vast.

Up until that point, it had been a basic assumption that the front-end and back-end had to be done in different languages if you wanted a site/app above a certain quality threshold (though Java applets and Silverlight (C#) had previously provided a way to run the same language on the front and back ends).

You're right, we need a PHP parser in ajax.

I didn't find it ridiculous. There were real, tangible benefits, like sharing the same validation code on the frontend and backend. Would I make it the sole reason to choose a given language? No, but there was demonstrable efficiency to it.

This is how I feel about "serverless".

I'm still in the "I have to pretend to like this buzzword in order to remain sane" stage with "serverless".

> if I'm reading it right, I am not a zoologist.

This had me in stitches. I'm also not a huge fan of obfuscatory jargon, irrespective of how cromulent such language may be.

but then you used the word "cromulent"

See Blackadder Season 3 for an explanation of why "cromulent" is now a punchline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSYiT2iG08

We biologists put that in the taxonomy as a “joke“

as a self-referential joke, hopefully!

For other @arthurcolle classics, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29371835

Woosh

> by the definition Hotmail should be the holotype instead of GMail, which would be the paratype

I think in this particular case the term "holotype" is being overloaded; it means both "general category of applications" and "what this author takes to be the canonical application in that category". I don't think an exact parallel to the zoological usage is intended.

For sure it's a terrible name (sorry, Jason ;P). In my other comment I talk about my experiences pitching this idea when I was https://web.dev content lead. There's something about this word that is an immediate turnoff and prevents people from really looking deeply at it. Which is a shame because it's such a useful mental model.

Names are important!

Could archetype/al/ical (or possibly prototypal) have been used instead? Both have associations with artefacts (usually authored and manufactured, respectively) rather than gathered specimens.

Sometimes when going deep into a subject I have to pause and explain that it’s a very specific name for what we are talking about and while it may seem pedantic, Naming Things Is Actually Incredibly Important. IMO naming things properly is at least 25% of a good system design.

Yes, they could have just listed examples and done without the “holotype” term. I don’t think it detracts from the point of the post, though.

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