Namespaces

The buggy software stopped working.

The glitches were obvious. The namespaces overlapped, and values that were not supposed to map into one another started mapping into anything they wanted to.

There seemed to be a hidden rule within all the incoherence, but it was difficult to isolate. It seemed that whenever a variable was referred to by something that was closely related to it categorically, there would be no syntactic clashes, but the greater the distance between the actual variable and the ones the user used, the greater the possibility of a namespace clash.

What are we, but a bunch of names, corresponding to the values of our identity. Our unique namespace, within reasonable domain, is guaranteed only by the human ability to distinguish one individual from another. It's not our personalities that make us different-- it's everyone else's ability to distinguish them that matters.

So the clash doesn't really matter, because as long as we know who we're talking to, and they know who we're talking to, names are but unnecessary variables. Sure, languages increase the breadth of our thoughts, but our names for each other are unnecessary once we could get rid of the issue of namespace clash.

It leads to the obvious conclusion that what you refer to me as doesn't really matter as long as you're consistent with it. Even the consistency doesn't matter, as long as I know that you are calling for me and me, and no one else. Of course, one assumes under emotionally close circumstances, it's obvious, but it's not nearly as universal as one might think. At my grandparents' house, whenever my grandmother calls for 'babu', there's four 'hajur's.

That shouldn't stop us from making our names whatever we want to, because names are personal, and the more personality we put into it, the more they're ours, even though they may refer to others.