3 ms·
I don't like mathematical notation's ambiguity and opaqueness much either, but it is fairly important for the notation to be terse. It's more important than in
by breuleux 9y ago
I don't like mathematical notation's ambiguity and opaqueness much either, but it is fairly important for the notation to be terse. It's more important than in software because so many proofs are about this being equivalent to that, and symbols give you a lot of room to work with, which you would not have with words. And I mean, the vocabulary already exists, papers just need to explain which symbol represents what. If a paper tells me that epsilon is the learning rate for some model, I know what that means and I can just keep it in mind when I read the math. I don't think I'd understand better if they write out "learning rate" over and over again.
- ccleve 9y agoBut that's not our experience in software. We do write "learningRate" over and over again, because we've learned that that makes the code much more understandable that just writing "e". In fact, we've learned that excessive terseness in software is an anti-pattern.
- breuleux 9y agoThat works fine for software, but mathematics are a different use case. If you want to simplify or rearrange an equation, what matters most is the structure, not the precise meanings you assign to the variables. If you want to understand how an equation relates to the real world or the task at hand, I agree that named variables help -- but if you want to do math, that is to say, manipulate equations, it makes more sense to work in a terser representation. Patterns will stand out more.