Make a glossary of all terms used and simplify and homogenize the vocabulary - Githubissues

larray-project / larray

N-dimensional labelled arrays in Python

https://larray.readthedocs.io/

GNU General Public License v3.0

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Make a glossary of all terms used and simplify and homogenize the vocabulary #1111

Open gdementen opened 1 month ago

gdementen commented 1 month ago

Throughout the API and documentation, we use various terms for very similar or even the same things.

We should:

make an exhaustive list of those terms
make a glossary of them (even for us, having precise definitions would help to know when to use each term)
determine which are most user-friendly (possibly poll our users about this)
apply those changes everywhere so that their usage is consistent

Examples include:

key vs subset vs selection vs Group vs label vs tick (on a axis) vs filter (as an action for the method name) vs boolean filter (to be used in getitem)
axis vs dimension
index vs position (including the name "reindex" which I never liked but I don't like relabel either 😉 )
axis reference
join method vs align vs ...
...

gdementen commented 1 month ago

I guess we should split this issue in several: creating a glossary of existing terms could be done relatively quickly, while reviewing the whole API is more an LArray 1.0 thing, which is probably several years away