So here’s a puzzler:<\/p>\n
Quite often I’ll find out that a technique I’ve been using for years, one I had originally developed because I needed a solution to some problem, has subsequently been independently rediscovered and published by someone else. And now this technique has an official name.<\/p>\n
Fair enough. The people publishing the technique are doing a service to the community that I never did: Going through the trouble of officially explaining how the technique works, and perhaps doing user studies to empirically test the technique. And it’s certainly not as if they stole it. Techniques get independently reinvented all the time.<\/p>\n
But here’s the puzzling part: Do I need to readjust my thinking, and rename the technique within my own code, to reflect that fact that it now has an official name? Do I need to do this even if I was using the technique for years before someone else independently reinvented it?<\/p>\n
I do think that if I publish a paper that relies on the technique, then I should use the newer term of art, and reference the other inventor’s publication. After all, that’s how the edifice of peer reviewed science works.<\/p>\n
But what about in my own code? I can think of at least one good argument on both sides:<\/p>\n
On one side, maybe I should keep it as is, because it would be untruthful to rename something I had already developed long before, just to reflect events that took place only later. That would be rewriting history.<\/p>\n
On the other side, maybe I should change it out of courtesy to other people who will build on my code later, since now there is a “standard” way to refer to this technique.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure there is an easy answer to this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So here’s a puzzler: Quite often I’ll find out that a technique I’ve been using for years, one I had originally developed because I needed a solution to some problem, has subsequently been independently rediscovered and published by someone else. And now this technique has an official name. Fair enough. The people publishing the technique … Continue reading “Attribution”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14409"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14409"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14410,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14409\/revisions\/14410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}