Clojurians Log v2

I'll start with a anectode about a german word. Yesterday I happened to scroll through Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik and I read the german word "Entwickelung" (german is my native tongue). That's a very slightly odd spelling of the word for Development ("Entwicklung") owed to the book's age and this triggered my mind to analyze the word: The word parts are "Ent-" and "wickeln". "Ent" is a prefix that is the equivalent of "de-" or "dis-" in english, and "wickeln" means roughly "to wrap / to wind", as in the textile sense. E.g. "jemand um den Finger wickeln" and "Ein Baby wickeln" are direct translations of "to wrap around someone's finger" and "to wrap a baby" (as in, change diapers; that's also the main modern use of "wickeln" on its own). But there's also a notion of twisting things together in the word wickeln. There's the word "verwickeln", as in "ver" and "wickeln". "In einer Sache verwickelt sein" means "to be wrapped up in something" or twisted together with a thing, event or endeavor. Accordingly "in Bandagen einwickeln" is what you do with mummies when you (en)wrap them in linen. Anyway, so in german "Ent-wickeln" (to de-velop) means to "de-wrap" a thing. That's quite interesting. Obviously I also wondered if this origin also applies to the english (and french) term "to develop", and it does, quite directly: "de-" or "dis-" is the prefix that kinda negates or undoes the word that follows after it, e.g. "to dis-integrate" means to take things that are integrated together and dissolve that integration, separate them (btw just noticed: dis-solve). And "-velop" comes from the french "voloper", meaning "to wrap something up". See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/develop and https://www.etymonline.com/word/develop So I guess "to develop" is the opposite of "to envelop" (and perhaps a "de-velopment" is the opposite of an "en-velope" 🙂). But more interestingly: Just as in german, "to de-velop" basically means "to de-wrap" and "to de-twist". As in, to take a thing that is all wrapped up and then make it not be wrapped up. Accordingly, a development is an unwrapping (unfolding?). I get a tingly feeling when trying to mentally bridge this origin with today's meaning of growing something along a certain direction. Especially with software because "to develop" it very often means to make it (or a part of it) connect to or further integrate ("twist up"?) with some other part. So if you write/change/construct your software such that it is now (more) wrapped up with (in) some other thing, you have done pretty much the opposite of de-veloping it. Pseudo-edit: oh, according to wiktionary: "The word acquired its modern meaning from the 17th-century belief that an egg contains the animal in miniature and matures by growing larger and shedding its envelopes." That's very slightly less interesting I guess. But still intriguing: What is stopping a thing from growing, expanding and refining are the things that it is wrapped up in, and to develop it means to (make that thing be able to) grow beyond its wrappings (confinements), and for that you have to identify and remove those.

It's obvious that this has strong similarities to and connections with the meaning of "sim-plex" and "com-plex" 🙂

In that sense, indistinguishable from "tease apart", which is how you develop an idea, no?

"Simple made easy" again, right?

I've always found etymology super interesting, so thanks for sharing this

https://www.wordreference.com/fren/d%C3%A9voiler is another instance of this

Thank you, that was an interesting observation. I think you have a point that much software development today is actually envelopment. 😅

You could also read "software envelopment" as "enveloping (the world?) in software"

Fun stuff, thanks again!

> In that sense, indistinguishable from "tease apart" Mostly, tho I personally associate "tease apart" more with this:

and envelopment with this:

As in, there is not just the tangle/snarl which comprises the thing we talk about, there is also some essence that's all caught up in it, and we need to find it and separate it out.

In Swedish, it’s “utveckling” which I’m pretty sure is borrowed directly from German, or at least from some common ancestor. And it indeed means “unwrap”, and a developer is an “unwrapper”.

https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C03RZGPG3/p1773918560117119?thread_ts=1773918068.071819&cid=C03RZGPG3 Having dived into the philology of Indo-European languages; it is remarkable sometimes how much of the semantics are conserved across time and space by the words we wind up independently using, even if a lot of the time there are local flavours infused into the usage of a word.

Thanks for the tip! They don't make it anymore, but the Word Matters podcast from the Merriam-Webster lexicographers were great https://www.npr.org/podcasts/925875362/word-matters.

That sounds like a great podcast for my commute. Thanks!