What is “Orthogonality”?

Question

What does \"orthogonality\" mean when talking about programming languages?

What are some examples of Orthogonality?

Answer 1

From Eric S. Raymond's "Art of UNIX programming"

Orthogonality is one of the most important properties that can help make even complex designs compact. In a purely orthogonal design, operations do not have side effects; each action (whether it's an API call, a macro invocation, or a language operation) changes just one thing without affecting others. There is one and only one way to change each property of whatever system you are controlling.