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By all means, steal ideas from math. (Great artists, etc.) Math has had a couple thousand years practice in learning how (and how not to) express abstract ideas
by hhas01 7y ago
By all means, steal ideas from math. (Great artists, etc.) Math has had a couple thousand years practice in learning how (and how not to) express abstract ideas as formal written text.
But don’t abuse math. Like redefining summation to mean any old thing under the sun. Least of all when it’s a fricking union, for which the math symbol is ‘∪’, not ‘＋’.
- melling 7y agoUnion symbol is not on the keyboard. Sure, make it easy to type then we can use it instead of + However, anyone who has been programming for a while should be able to puzzle out what + is doing.
- jchook 7y agoEmojis aren’t on the keyboard either but folks don’t seem to have a problem typing them, even on desktop. Funny that software engineers can figure out complex parallelism and algorithms, but typing ∪ as a function name is next to blasphemy.
- noelwelsh 7y agoBoth set union and number addition are examples of monoids, a maths concept from the field of abstract algebra. So there is a maths abstraction that unites these ideas.
- xyelos 7y agoUhh quick limiting thing here (although I agree that the addition symbol is fine): the existence of a unifying math concept alone does not justify using the "+" symbol. By that argument, notating permutation conjugation with a "+" is fine, but that would be a notational sin as the "+" operator is reserved for commutative operations. However, with that disclaimer, noting that both operations form monoids and both are commutative justifies the "+".
- wyager 7y agoHaskell doesn't use the + symbol for monoids, it uses <>.