【divine eroticism】

Computer science concepts are divine eroticismoften named after real-world equivalents.

A queue, for instance, is a data structure where the first object in is the first object out, much like the functions of a real-word queue. A stack, meanwhile, is last-in first-out, similar to how one would retrieve items from a stack without toppling it over.

And then there's the tree.

Instead of growing upwards like the trees you see outside, the tree structure grows downwards, something that the writers of this particular discrete math textbook decided to call out.

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"A picture like this is called a tree," reads the textbook. "If you want to know why the tree is growing upside down, ask the computer scientists who introduced this convention. (The conventional wisdom is that they never went out of the room, and so they never saw a real tree.)"

Yes, it's commonly thought that programmers and computer scientists take to the indoors and rarely leave the house. Perhaps this is another piece of evidence to that theory.

The resulting comments certainly did not really help disprove the stereotype.

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Reddit

If anything, Reddit very much supported the whole isolated programmer troupe.

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Reddit

One redditor had a great comeback for the mathematicians who wrote the book.

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Someone else shared their own tree revelation.

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In case you were curious, there were those who just had to share the logical explanation for the seemingly strange name convention.

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Cool explanation, but we're still gonna laugh at that joke.

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