What Is a Property?
Comments
happytoexplain
analog31
I'm reminded of the story of Richard Feynman and the names of birds:
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/85809/feynman...
alpaylan
I agree. It’s especially weird moving across related domains because suddenly something you think you know has changed meaning. For instance eBPF is “verified”, but the verification is almost completely unrelated from the usual connotations.
AlienRobot
The worst thing is being corrected about minutiae. It's not a "property" it's an attribute/field/member/key/column/variable/getter/function/procedure. Deep down it's all variables. Even the constants are variables from the viewpoint of the CPU that has to load it in its registers.
Sometimes I see people saying "in LANG, obj.foo is just 'syntax sugar' for foo(obj)" and I think that technically it has always been "syntax sugar" and there have always been ways to call any "method" with any "object" of any "type."
Sometime along the way we decided that "syntax sugar" means "it means the same thing as" but except for (<cast OtherType>obj).foo(), which means that the semantics of "syntax sugar" don't mean it's simpler than the phrase it was supposed to replace.
wizardforhire
This is literally the difficulties with learning any discipline!
troupo
It doesn't help that many texts approach this as a very pseudo-mathematics abstract. It's not a function, it's an implication. It's there are satisfactions of preconditions, there's a thousand different things.
Unfortunately, very few texts and tutorials on property-based testing actually tell you how to see what properties are. I have it on paper somewhere in some workshop materials. But online I think this is one of the very few that describe what they are: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/property-based-testi...
Maybe I have a bit of a brain problem, but for me, 90% of the effort that goes into learning anything in tech is spent on identifying which nouns are Nouns, and which are just nouns, and the (often mushy) semantics of how people use those nouns in varying contexts and sub-contexts. I understand the reasons for this complexity - domain-specific terminology is valuable and forms naturally from pre-existing words. It's just that, in tech, everything is abstract, and everything consists of multiple contexts spread across multiple dimensions (vertically, in abstraction layers; horizontally, in use cases), so the domain-specific terminology explodes like an exponential web. Sometimes I'm talking to somebody and they are using some word, and it takes me days to even realize that they are using it in a much more specific context than I assumed. It's a little hellish.