I agree and was going to say the same thing, so instead I'll elaborate on another angle. (Also—don't shorten to auth solves the vast majority of this debate.)
Some things in computer science are just plain "hard," and no amount of renaming or abstracting is going to solve it; you either need to take the time to understand it (i.e. learn authenticate = prove you who are, authorize = what are you allowed to do), or outsource the prob (e.g. "don't roll your own crypto").
Similar problems:
- Time. It's non-linear in calendar representations because of definition changes by humans. There are gaps in years trying to reconcile different calendars. There are leap seconds added based on scientific measurements, non-deterministic ways. Time zones enough confuse people. 99% of the time you can use something like "duration since 1970 UTC" (unix epoch) but you may eventually hit non-linearities if you try and say "once every 10 days" by doing 10 * secs / day.
- Names. Different all over the world. I won't even give examples because I'm still a bit confused, I recently learned that in parts of India first name and surname are reversed, so not even consistent in one country. Prob best to just put a "Name" field and a "Nickname / Display Name" field and let the user decide.
- Geodistance. The Earth is not a sphere, it's an "oblate ellipsoid" since the spinny makes the middle bulge. There are many ways to calculate distance between two coords and generally simple ones will work for majority of settlements. But if your customers are near the poles, or maybe include flight paths, etc the errors could be very significant. I've had this leak out in cases like Postgres where you can use the sphere approximation (much faster) or the proper calculationg (much slower) when running a query like "give me all points within a x mile radius".
Auth (hah!) is just another one intrinsically difficult concept that's not made more complex by language and can't be simplified away.
Some things in computer science are just plain "hard," and no amount of renaming or abstracting is going to solve it; you either need to take the time to understand it (i.e. learn authenticate = prove you who are, authorize = what are you allowed to do), or outsource the prob (e.g. "don't roll your own crypto").
Similar problems:
- Time. It's non-linear in calendar representations because of definition changes by humans. There are gaps in years trying to reconcile different calendars. There are leap seconds added based on scientific measurements, non-deterministic ways. Time zones enough confuse people. 99% of the time you can use something like "duration since 1970 UTC" (unix epoch) but you may eventually hit non-linearities if you try and say "once every 10 days" by doing 10 * secs / day.
- Names. Different all over the world. I won't even give examples because I'm still a bit confused, I recently learned that in parts of India first name and surname are reversed, so not even consistent in one country. Prob best to just put a "Name" field and a "Nickname / Display Name" field and let the user decide.
- Geodistance. The Earth is not a sphere, it's an "oblate ellipsoid" since the spinny makes the middle bulge. There are many ways to calculate distance between two coords and generally simple ones will work for majority of settlements. But if your customers are near the poles, or maybe include flight paths, etc the errors could be very significant. I've had this leak out in cases like Postgres where you can use the sphere approximation (much faster) or the proper calculationg (much slower) when running a query like "give me all points within a x mile radius".
Auth (hah!) is just another one intrinsically difficult concept that's not made more complex by language and can't be simplified away.