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> Do you think perhaps there's a reason why a simple and easy trick like commenting and renaming lemmas has been discovered and solidified as standard practice
by akie 11y ago
> Do you think perhaps there's a reason why a simple and easy trick like commenting and renaming lemmas has been discovered and solidified as standard practice in programming, but hasn't been adopted in mathematics? Are mathematicians really just SO dumb?
No, they aren't, but the example in question would have been easier to understand if he had tried to explain what was going on, instead of just saying "it is trivial that this or that follows". I think the comparison with "old code syndrome" is pretty much spot on, to be honest.
- conceit 11y ago... especially if code is to be considered in the terms of information theory. Context is important and context can't be encoded without raising the entropy. Also, speech and to a large degree mathematical symbolism are sequential, so multi dimensional problems would have to be broken down into one sequential dimension, raising the entropy exponentially or whatever or loosing information. Can't help it.