4 ms·

> recent decades of programming experience as opposed to recent millennia of mathematical experience?

• whimsicalism 6y ago
  Let's not pretend math notation has remained constant for millennia.
  • enriquto 6y ago
    Of course it has evolved. But some landmarks of it (e.g., using single letters for "variables") have been used since 2500 years ago. Now I laugh when programmers tell me to be "civilized" and name my matrices with full words.
  • snakeboy 6y ago
    Exactly, it has been refined over millennia.
    • creata 6y ago
      Right, and it's important to remember that mathematics is sharply optimized for human understanding, whereas programming languages strike a careful compromise between human understanding and efficient execution by machines. I don't think anyone could seriously argue that programming languages are "more expressive" than mathematical notation, which has the powers of ambiguity and hand-drawn graphics.
      • Koshkin 6y ago
        You are not wrong. Replace 'efficient execution by machines' with 'efficient processing by a compiler' and you will be even more correct.
• Koshkin 6y ago
  To be fair, the mathematical notation that is familiar to us today is just a few hundred years old.