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Comment by jamesemmott | Hacker News Reader

This original sense of 'call' (deriving from the 'call number' used to organize books and other materials in physical libraries) was also responsible for the coinage of 'compiler', according to Grace Hopper: 'The reason it got called a compiler [around 1952] was that each subroutine was given a "call word", because the subroutines were in a library, and when you pull stuff out of a library you compile things. It's as simple as that.'

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I invoke them :]

Synonyms of "invoke" include "call forth" and "conjure up."

Or a "call sheet", which is the list of cast and crew needed for a particular film shoot

Same here, but I will say "a function call", not "a function invocation".

Invoking X sounds deliciously alchymistic, by the way.

The functional peeps even `apply` them.

I've never been quite sure when I'm applying data to a function, or applying a function to some data

Is the data changing or the function changing?

In a functional language, neither

(though new data is created as a result of running the function, technically this is guaranteed to not affect the inputs due to the function having to be pure)

(perhaps this is excessively pedantic)

let's just map pedantic->precise and call it a day :)

When running the routine, is it typically the function that changes or the input data that changes?

If it's the same function running on different data, then you are applying the function to the data. If it's the same data running in a different function, then you are applying the data to the function.

This tripped me up last week when I was reading Futamura’s paper on partial evaluation (i .e., Futamura projections). I’m not used to the “apply” terminology for functions, even though I learned the lambda calculus in grad school over a decade ago.

to my mind the function has always been the definition of the process and the data what that process, well, applies to. so you apply the function to the data and get an output.

Shame we can't use `cast`, that's already being used for types. And `conjure` probably only works for object constructors.

And 'summon' is just used for demons.

A keyword exclusively used for network calls, in particular microservices ahaahaha

Erlang/Elixir use "cast" method name when sending messages to their GenServer actor processes.

There are two terms.

* call - to send and await a reply * cast - to send and not await a reply

AFAIK there isn't a wizardly joke programming language yet--perhaps that was considered redundant--but you can use "giving" and "taking" if you're a rock-star programmer. :P

https://codewithrockstar.com/

let's use conjure for method interactions and reify as a special case when that method is a constructor. the more this sounds like medieval alchemy the more I can get behind it, and I've already got misbehaving daemons

I fondly remember blessing objects in perl.

https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/bless

I bind my functions before I apply them

I just connected the dots... The identifier digits in the Dewey Decimal classification are called "call numbers" !

Yes, that's in the second paragraph of the article.

I took this to be a pun on "decimal" and "connecting the dots" but perhaps I'm just wired to see puns where they weren't necessarily intended.

  > I'm just wired to see puns where they weren't necessarily intended.

I guess it keeps you grounded. Shocking how that works.

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