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> People who don't speak english for example but who read python can often read code you wrote and understand it. Math is a similar thing and sometimes called a
by supergarfield 8y ago
> People who don't speak english for example but who read python can often read code you wrote and understand it. Math is a similar thing and sometimes called a universal language.
I doubt that's true. It would be like reading re-prettified minified Javascript: they wouldn't understand the meaning of the identifiers or comments. That doesn't strictly make it impossible to understand the code, but it's much, much harder.
It's the same for math, frankly: without explanations of what the things in equations are, or why the author is doing what they are doing, it's somewhere between very hard to understand (for the most formal stuff, like the Principia), and hopeless for most papers.
- bryondowd 8y agoCan confirm, dealing with code in a foreign language is not easy. A few years ago I had to re-implement from behavior in our application that had been baked into the firmware of our old printers, since the new ones were supposed to be off-the-shelf. We had the source code for the old printers, so no problem, right? Except the company that made them was French, so every comment was in French, and all the identifiers were not just French, but French abbreviations and acronyms mixed together. I could run the comments through Google translate and get a good enough idea, but there was almost nothing I could do about the identifiers, except occasionally get lucky and guess based on cognates. Can't imagine how it would have gone if the language was less similar, like any of the Asian languages. Thankfully, I didn't really need to refer to the source code often, since I could just work out the finer points of the behaviors I needed to mimic by printing messages that hit all the corner cases.