Bezalel P. answered • 19d
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The word comes from mathematics, where orthogonal means "perpendicular" or "independent" two orthogonal vectors don't affect each other.
In programming languages, orthogonality means:
A small set of features can be combined in any way, without special cases or exceptions.
In other words, the features work independently of each other, and mixing them together always works consistently and predictably.
[1, 2, 3] -- list of ints
["a", "b", "c"] -- list of strings
[[1,2], [3,4]] -- list of lists
[Just 1, Nothing] -- list of Maybe values
The concept of a list works the same way regardless of what's inside it. The list feature is fully independent of the type feature. You can combine them freely in any way.
