3 ms·
Well, not OP, but that was all very understandable to me, and resonated. I'll try to explain some specific points. >Why do this rather then define an abstract,
by traverseda 10y ago
Well, not OP, but that was all very understandable to me, and resonated. I'll try to explain some specific points.
>Why do this rather then define an abstract, human-evaluatable, programming language?
The syntax of math is bad for a number of reasons. Making it some big 3D thing isn't going to make that syntax more reasonable.
Math is a language that could learn a lot from programming languages, even if you don't plan on running it on a computer and dealing with all that hassle.
>Making strange squigles on a page doesn't help. Making strange greek symbols on the page doesn't help.
>Ditch the alphabet soup (and yes, even the 5th centry Greek alphabet soupe)
Math is optimized for paper. This makes it a lot less accessible these days. All these custom glyphs are a damn weird idea. Naming your variables "a" wouldn't be accepted in any other languages.
>Abstract common ideas into "functions".
Once you've abandoned the idea of single-letter variable names, it becomes easier to abstract common mathematical ideas into functions and build a great big library of those functions.
> Use logically derived variable names (even if they're 5-10 characters).
Naming your variables "a" wouldn't be accepted in any other languages, and from the outside looks like a pretty silly idea.
>Phi shouldn't mean 30 things depending on the field you're in.
Choose more descriptive variable names.