Naming things: value / amount?

[joakim]

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

What should be the name of the query parameter specifying how many iotas to transfer?

When writing this proposal, I went with IOTA's own term, value. I've since come to think that maybe amount is a more user friendly term. So, what should it be?

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Value

Monetary or material worth. An amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else; a fair price or return.

• The term used in IOTA itself
• Also used by various websites and services in the IOTA ecosystem, e.g. TheTangle.org

Amount

A number; a sum. The total of two or more quantities; the aggregate.

• The term used by most (almost all?) wallets
• Also used elsewhere in the context of transactions, for example by PayPal

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My input:

• value reflects IOTA's own internal naming, and is a more technical term ("the transaction's value")
• amount is often used in UI, and is a more user-friendly term ("sending X amount of iotas")

So what it comes down to is whether to use a technical term or a user-friendly term. Whether to map to IOTA's internal name for it, or to map to the term users see in their wallet apps.

If IOTA users only see "Amount" and maybe never encounter the technical term value, they might expect the URI scheme to accept iota:<address>?amount=<amount>, which if it didn't would result in the value/amount being ignored by the app. There are way more end users than there are devs, so I think amount is what will cause the least trouble/side-effects.

Naming is hard. Thank goodness there's no cache invalidation to worry about :)

[joakim]

As no one has objected in 3 hours, I'll go ahead and change the spec from value to amount :)