3 ms·

because we know how to read and don't care what a bunch of outsiders think.

• klibertp 11y ago
  Yeah, that's exactly my suspicion! I'm just happy it's not true for Computer Science and programming. Whatever you want to say about a social side of programming, there's no denying it that outsiders and beginners are warmly welcomed in the community. We create and provide for free tutorials and guides for beginners, we design languages to be as easy for people to understand as possible (we don't exactly know what makes languages easy to understand, but we at least try!), we create tools for visualisation and summarizing code, and so on. Similar activities seem to be unpopular with mathematicians. I can't help but feel mathematicians are just a bunch of elitist pricks, who know they are on their way out and who try to build artificial barriers for entry into their field to make themselves needed for a bit longer. It's actually natural, most people will fight to retain their status (and jobs). It reminds me of "refucktoring", writing convoluted, unreadable code just to make sure nobody, else than you, can work with it. Such programmers are shunned in our community, yet they are heroes in mathematics. Oh well, as an "outsider" it's not my problem.