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Many papers are source code in a way. In addition to communicating the results, you are communicating the process and details of analysis so that it can be repl
by blix 7y ago
Many papers are source code in a way. In addition to communicating the results, you are communicating the process and details of analysis so that it can be replicated. This requires precision and often jargon.
To borrow your joke, please transform "homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space" into plain language with no loss of precision.
- probably_wrong 7y agoI really like your idea of working from the joke backwards, because I think it illustrates both of our points clearly. On one hand, writing that into plain language would take forever. By the time I'm done, I would have probably written a small book on algebra. Here, the use of jargon is definitely precise. If you wanted to present this in a topology conference, where it might be important that the number of dimensions of the space is infinite, it would be probably a good start. On the other hand, thousands of people use git everyday without understanding a single word of this description. But if I say instead "git is a distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software development", my clarity has now skyrocketed. I definitely lost a lot of precision, but my readers will still be able to replicate my results. That's not to say that there is no necessary jargon - my own definition uses "distributed version-control", which is absolutely key for understanding what's going on.