3 ms·

> It may be time to revisit our interest in it. It is.

• klibertp 9y ago
  Sorry for the off-topic, but I'd like to ask you a question and this is the only way of contacting you I have. It took me a lot of time to see your response to my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14921237 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14921237 and continuing the discussion there wouldn't work, so I decided to hunt you down in recent comments :) What I'd like to ask is: do you know of any mathematician who (publicly) shares your views on mathematical notation? The thing is, I agree 100% with what you wrote, but I also know how hostile and defensive the mathematicians (and "mathy type" programmers) can get about this. I figured they'd be more likely to listen to "one of their own"... Basically, I'd like to have a link to some blog post or something which explains why the notational wild-west is not a good thing from the perspective of a mathematician. Are you aware of such a thing? I couldn't find any, unfortunately :(
  • gnaritas 9y ago
    > do you know of any mathematician who (publicly) shares your views on mathematical notation? Gerry Sussman from MIT. I've seen him lecture in particular about how math notation relies far too much on implicit assumed knowledge (like operator precedence) rather than on explicit syntax. He said it's vastly easier to teach people math when you make everything explicit and thus he likes teaching in Scheme, force them write out the full algorithm with no implicit hidden assumptions.