How do you explain orthogonality to a non-technical person?

Posted by DR on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by DR
Published on 2009-03-11T09:36:47Z Indexed on 2010/04/16 9:03 UTC
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orthogonality

In The Pragmatic Programmer this term is introduced and "linearly independency" is used as an example for orthogonality.

How do you explain the same thing to a non-technical person and why independency is a good thing to have? Are there "real-life" (i.e. non-geek) examples for this concept?

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