backward charges

I have been trying to understand how Franklin got the charges wrong,
and I have repeatedly told myself to try to understand how if he had
named it the other way, things would have been much easier. I think I
am beginning to understand.

When Benjamin Franklin was studying electricity, he thought that there
was this "electrical fluid" that existed on the surface of an object.
When rubbing glass with silk, the glass acquired a charge that was
opposite of that obtained by rubbing amber with fur. This were easily
observed when putting two silk-rubbed glasses together--they repel
each other. The same effect was seen with fur-rubbed amber. However,
putting amber and glass together resulted in attraction.

Franklin decided arbitrarily that the glass obtained a positive
charge, that is, it was thought to that the silk conferred electrical
fluid onto the glass. And the fur, in contrast, removed the electrical
fluid.

It was a 50/50 chance, and he guessed it wrong.

In reality, silk actually removed the electrical fluid from the glass,
and fur added it onto the amber. The amber should have been the one
receiving the positive charge, for positive would have been like a
positive number, it gained something. The glass then received a
negative charge, it lost something.

Unfortunately, we have been living with Franklin's choice for over 200
years since his discovery, and there is no practical way to change it.
We say a glass has positive charge because electrons have been taken
away from--and not added to--it.

Imagine if we instead live in a world where the convention wasn't
backward. A world of electricity in which electrons move to a negative
charge because negative would mean that it has less electrons.

Imagine if we wrote a sodium ion as having a negative charge, meaning
it lacks one electron that would make it neutral. Imagine if we saw
sulfate ion as SO4 2+, with a positive charge, meaning that it holds
two electrons, it is positive of electrons. And we could be talking
about electropositivity rather than electronegativity when referring
to the tendency of an ion to be electron-greedy. So, looking at a
water molecule, H20, we can say that the oxygen side is more delta-
positive and the hydrogen side is more delta-negative because the
oxygen loves electrons and is taking them away from the hydrogen.

The confusion over reducing a compound meaning to add electrons to it
could have been eliminated, since it is instead negative, and we add
electrons, which are positive. We could have called it incrementation,
not reduction. Redox reaction would have been called something else.
Indox, perhaps.

But alas, that is not the way of this world. And with each passing
day, the scientists are dead-set on this inefficient path and will not
change.

On the other hand, the counterintuitive labeling could be helpful to
programmers who need to understand the concept of abstraction, the
idea that a variable can be separate from its meaning. So for example,
we can say a bobcat is a dog as long as we redefine dog contradict its
current Anglo-Saxon meaning. Naturally, this could be unambiguously
used in the local namespace, but not the global.