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> Mathematics is usually written in something like Haskell syntax a good way to make something readable to the general public is to make the opposite of what a

> Mathematics is usually written in something like Haskell syntax a good way to make something readable to the general public is to make the opposite of what a mathematician would do

dboreham 6y ago
Standardized mathematical notation is one of the crowning human achievements of the last 2 millennia.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  "crowning human achievements" and "understandable to the general public" aren't, I believe, correlated in any way
LolWolf 6y ago
A good way to make something readable to the general public would be to not even write it in math. (But then again, that's not a very useful statement when we need things written out in math.) Snarkiness aside, I do agree that a good number of mathematicians don't know how to write, but that does not mean that mathematical writing is intrinsically bad. We don't judge a random programming language as "bad," just because a random member of the public isn't able to parse it (since a random member of the public likely has not learned any programming, much less that language's syntax), so why would we apply similar statements to math in the same way?
dan-robertson 6y ago
Well the parent comment seemed to claim that C syntax is more based on mathematics than Haskell. I don’t want to comment on what is better. Mathematicians tend to care quite a lot about notation and finding good notations but that notation typically doesn’t have to last very long or travel very far. People tend to take it for granted that having very variable situation specific notation is bad but I don’t think it’s obviously true. I certainly don’t think it’s obvious that programming language syntax should be based on the kind of high school algebra notation people are familiar with because that notation is mostly useful for manipulating sums of products of variables raised to powers, and one-argument functions thereof. I don’t think programming fits that category or that addition and multiplication are particularly important operations in programming.
boomer_joe 6y ago
And a good way to make something good is to do exactly what a mathematician would do

> Mathematics is usually written in something like Haskell syntax a good way to make something readable to the general public is to make the opposite of what a mathematician would do

dboreham 6y ago

Standardized mathematical notation is one of the crowning human achievements of the last 2 millennia.

jcelerier 6y ago
"crowning human achievements" and "understandable to the general public" aren't, I believe, correlated in any way

LolWolf 6y ago

A good way to make something readable to the general public would be to not even write it in math. (But then again, that's not a very useful statement when we need things written out in math.) Snarkiness aside, I do agree that a good number of mathematicians don't know how to write, but that does not mean that mathematical writing is intrinsically bad. We don't judge a random programming language as "bad," just because a random member of the public isn't able to parse it (since a random member of the public likely has not learned any programming, much less that language's syntax), so why would we apply similar statements to math in the same way?

dan-robertson 6y ago

Well the parent comment seemed to claim that C syntax is more based on mathematics than Haskell. I don’t want to comment on what is better. Mathematicians tend to care quite a lot about notation and finding good notations but that notation typically doesn’t have to last very long or travel very far. People tend to take it for granted that having very variable situation specific notation is bad but I don’t think it’s obviously true. I certainly don’t think it’s obvious that programming language syntax should be based on the kind of high school algebra notation people are familiar with because that notation is mostly useful for manipulating sums of products of variables raised to powers, and one-argument functions thereof. I don’t think programming fits that category or that addition and multiplication are particularly important operations in programming.

boomer_joe 6y ago

And a good way to make something good is to do exactly what a mathematician would do