5 ms·
As a non-English programmer who has seen a lot of code not written using English please, god, NO. The mixture of English and other languages identifiers in the
by alufers 6y ago
As a non-English programmer who has seen a lot of code not written using English please, god, NO. The mixture of English and other languages identifiers in the external libraries makes me cry.
- wiz21c 6y agoYep, writing non english keywords in C++ is like having prolog code inside c++ :-) (but as a non english person, I find it very helpful to be able to have unicode in strings)
- q92z8oeif 6y agothat's fine, keep using english. But do not expect people that do not speak english to learn it if there's an alternative. Someday we might have multilingual frameworks and not restrict programming to the privileged few that could learn a second language. Entitled programers are so into their broculture they can't see their own problems as being socially constructed. On one hand they complain "reading mixed language code is hard, despite me being fluent on both! everyone should speak what is more convenient to me!" without realizing they are leaving billions of people that do not know english out. Then on this very same thread they also complain that "reading math with greek letters is too hard" despite that being an arbitrary rule set in place by the people that used greek and latin knowledge as a way to make their privilege less accessible. The irony is dense! ...don't even get me started on a programmer workers union.
- aspaceman 6y agoI really disagree with the idea that math uses greek letters just to make things less accessible. If you have a better symbol than the large S for an integral, or Sigma for sums, I'd love to hear it.
- wtallis 6y agoPeople who complain about math notation and want something more verbose like programming usually don't fully understand the notation they're complaining about. In particular, there are fairly strong conventions for which letters get used for which purposes. Longer variable names that try to be more descriptive often aren't as necessary as they might seem, and in many cases would make an expression less generic than it really is. And then there's the fact that what's easy to type on a standard keyboard without a specialized IME has little bearing on what notation is most effective for the reader, or for someone writing on paper or blackboard.
- staticassertion 6y agoIt would be cool if more papers had a glossary for the symbols they use, though. If you're going to use a bunch of single character symbols, at least put somewhere what they are.
- gumby 6y agoThe abstract and introduction to a math paper usually does so, though sometimes they slip up and in then in the middle of the paper you find some strange symbol and have to manually binary search for it.
- slavik81 6y agoI wish I could click on a symbol in an equation and have it either pop up a full name / definition for standard symbols, or scroll to where the variable was defined for paper-specific symbols. When studying papers, I spend way too much time trying to answer questions like, "what was 'n' again?"
- gumby 6y agoI usually write notes as I read anyway — not just marginalia but typically on the back of the first page or in my notebook. Back of the first page is an excellent place for things like that.
- asjw 6y agoI believe that Archimedes used Greek because it was the only language he knew...
- alufers 6y ago> Someday we might have multilingual frameworks and not restrict programming to the privileged few that could learn a second language. I seriously doubt it, English is really easy to learn (sure the pronunciation is weird, but who needs it when you are writing code), and by learning English you can understand all the code with identifiers in English, written not only by native-speakers. Additionally, I wouldn't want a person who couldn't be bothered to learn a natural language to be a programmer in my company (if it was based in a non-English speaking country, of course). > "reading mixed language code is hard, despite me being fluent on both! everyone should speak what is more convenient to me!" > leaving billions of people that do not know english out. How is writing bilingual code including more people? You are limiting the total amount of people who speak English to the subset of people who know both the language.
- malkia 6y agoI wish Math used normal english, not greek letters - english is my second language too..
- zorked 6y agoThey are latin letters, not english. Unless you mean futhorc. Which would be awesome.
- notRobot 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet Many of these characters are hard to type on regular keyboards, which is probably what the parent commenter was referring to.
- throwaway894345 6y agoHe didn't say "english letters", he said "english" which is a language. The implication is that we should use conventions (including potentially whole words) that are familiar to the English-literate world and not Greek glyphs.
- coldtea 6y ago>The implication is that we should use conventions (including potentially whole words) that are familiar to the English-literate world and not Greek glyphs. The "english-literate" world (emphasis on literate) is, or historically has been, very familiar with Greek glyphs. And that's just for humanities. The mathematic and physics -literate world, doubly so. Everybody uses pi, theta, sigma (e.g. the summation formula) etc symbols...
- throwaway894345 6y ago> The "english-literate" world (emphasis on literate) is, or historically has been, very familiar with Greek glyphs. I would be shocked if even 1% of native English speakers could list the full Greek alphabet much less have a comprehensive familiarity with what each letter means across all branches of mathematics. I would be shocked if even 5% of native English speakers could tell you what theta generally means in geometry, much less all its other meanings.