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This is why I don't like math. I guess mathematicians write like that because it's faster to write on a blackboard. When I do it myself in code I always go back
by z3t4 9y ago
This is why I don't like math. I guess mathematicians write like that because it's faster to write on a blackboard. When I do it myself in code I always go back and rename those single letter variables to proper names. It forces me to know what the code actually resembles, not just a formula I learned by heart.
- Roboprog 9y agoI’m not going to defend single letter names (although shortness does have some virtue compared to some monstrous naming conventions), but... Most math texts have a fair amount of documentation when formulas are introduced. Perhaps substantially more than the table in this article.
- kazinator 9y agoMath papers on the other hand assume that the reader has recursively traversed and read all of the citations and knows most of the notation.
- xyzzyz 9y agoOf course, that’s the whole point of citations and notation. Do you want every single paper to be 500+ pages? I have better things to do trying to figure out where the novel result is in hundreds of pages of the same shit I’ve seen dozens of time already.