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I think people's brains must work different, because for me this would be a terrible way to do it. I simply cannot read and comprehend math with very long descr

I think people's brains must work different, because for me this would be a terrible way to do it. I simply cannot read and comprehend math with very long descriptive variable names. Whenever I see people do that, I have to write down the equation with single letters, and then look at it. I am more of a literate programming type of person. I prefer writing longer explanations of code. But usually as a header. I like keeping the core of the code as clean and noise free as possible. So I write code more like a math or physics book I guess. The equations are kept simple and clutter free, and then there is a body of text above or below explaining how to think about it. I tend to prefer using a lot of unicode, because following conventions helps me a lot. If I see a t₀, t and Δt variable e.g. I immediately get a sense of what sort of variables this is and how they are related. If instead it said start_time_of_incident, current_time and time_difference_between_events I could not quickly parse and internalize that.

geokon 7y ago
Yeah, I feel you on that and I started out writing in a similar style b/c it's terse and easy to digest. To be clear, this is mostly a hobby things for me so I'm not speaking from a position of authority, but in my limited experience once the problem gets bigger and you worry about performance/caching/recursion/etc. the math and equation start to diverge from the code substantially. For instance over the last few months I've been playing with BLAS and the BLAS operators just don't really map cleanly to equations - and the way you structure efficient solutions just ends up being more nuanced and complicated than the simple clean "theoretical" on-paper solution. All the nuances need to be captured in the variable names to have any chance of making the code understandable
- Fronzie 7y ago
  the distance between BLAS and mathematics is quite big. Have you had a look at, for example, the Eigen library? Although it's still more verbose than math notation, it stays much closer and, in my experience, does allow for nearly all the optimization-wiggle-room one could want.

geokon 7y ago

Yeah, I feel you on that and I started out writing in a similar style b/c it's terse and easy to digest. To be clear, this is mostly a hobby things for me so I'm not speaking from a position of authority, but in my limited experience once the problem gets bigger and you worry about performance/caching/recursion/etc. the math and equation start to diverge from the code substantially. For instance over the last few months I've been playing with BLAS and the BLAS operators just don't really map cleanly to equations - and the way you structure efficient solutions just ends up being more nuanced and complicated than the simple clean "theoretical" on-paper solution. All the nuances need to be captured in the variable names to have any chance of making the code understandable

Fronzie 7y ago
the distance between BLAS and mathematics is quite big. Have you had a look at, for example, the Eigen library? Although it's still more verbose than math notation, it stays much closer and, in my experience, does allow for nearly all the optimization-wiggle-room one could want.