Friday, September 8, 2017

First World Problems, Blockchain Developer Edition: My Official "Trie" Pronunciation Rant

Here's this thing that happens....  A youngish chap starts discussing his fun blockchain project, and naively steps into a beartrap....  He utters the phrase "Merkle Trie" (Trie as "tree"), then an older guy chortles with a paternal sternness and repronounces it "Merkle Trie" (Trie as "try").

Well angry experienced guy....  You are wrong!

And I have word on this from no less than Edward Kmett.  Or if you aren't impressed by that, how about a little thing I call...........  the collective wisdom of entire world!  Or maaaaaaybe.....  the actual inventor of the trie himself!

I mean, I get it....  over time it has evolved a bit and now has this cute quirky alternative pronunciation that your CS486 TA used in lab class right before uttering the phrase "A review session shall be held to study the essential datum to be considered".

But try this on for size Mr. Hot-Pants:  A trie actually *is* a tree.  I mean, one specific type of tree, but a tree nevertheless, so is it really gonna freak out people's brains if you say "The balance is stored in the trie" and they hear "The balance is stored in the tree"?

And do you know what a trie is definitely not?  It is not a "try", whatever that *possibly* could even mean.

And yeah, you just happen to be in that one in a million case where you have both a tree-that-isn't-a-trie *and* and tree-that-is-a-trie, and boy it is useful that you can verbally distinguish the two without having to actually say one extra word.

So it is great that *your* superior pronunciation exists to avoid all that confusion.  Except...........  You ***literally*** chose to pronounce it as the 127th most common word in the English language (as opposed to "tree", which comes in at 596, you dork), a word that for some bizarre reason happens to be hardwired in *my brain* to only ever be interpreted precisely as a verb.

I mean, why don't you just call it a "the", or an "and", or something equally preposterous.  In fact, why don't we just call all of our internal algorithmic structures the top words on the English frequency list so we can avoid an accidental overlap with any mythological zoological creatures or whatever.  Then we can have incredibly clean sentences like

"Querying the first A in the BUT and adding the OF to the HAVE requires a complexity of O(n^2)"


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