Paradigms

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In a philosopy, a paradigm is a whole (different) way of thinking about something, in anything from epistemology (how to approach what we know) to rhetoric (how do I make my audience think this way)



A programming paradigm often carries a sense of 'a whole different way of setting up a system, that also directs how you would implement things in it', which could include things as broad as functional programming (and others in such a typology), but also gets used for more specific, such as the sort of code you have to write for GPUs, and perhaps things like MPI (a way of messaging/parallelizing).

...or sometimes an algorithmic paradigm, which groups algorithms. Say, recursion, greedy algorithms, dynamic programming and divide and conquer are useful ways to tackle problems, but not concrete.


In scientific-style experiment design, an experimental paradigm often refers to a fairly specific experiment setup / protocol, a way of testing for a specific thing, and often has a fairly specific theoretical explanation.



In linguistics, a paradigmparadigm is a complete-ish set of word forms associated with a given lexeme (inflections/conjugations; changes in grammatical categories such as tense, mood, number, gender, and case). Which relates to word formation.

You might want to call those inflectional paradigms, because the word gets used for other things. For example, around language teaching (and perhaps semantic modelling) you also see 'lexical paradigms', things that belong in the same sort of set, e.g. run, walk, jump, and maybe swim.