Naming things is one of the notorious "hard problems with computer science". Using numbers allows us to have a referent without interpretation, avoiding a lot of bikeshedding and confusion.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

take “bike shedding” for example

the stupid question IS bikeshedding

it's also easy to just make your own lexicon anyway, that's what i've done, i have a whole data structure with name/number/symbols bound together and reverse lookups so you can go the other way, easily create a printable version of the number

the question is silly because an enum scheme would mean fighting over the human readable forms and there's just no reason for that, it's irrelevant