8 ms·

I just wish the Julia community wasn't so invested in using UTF8 symbols in the code. I understand that for Physicists, Engineers, Mathematicians, etc it look c

• moelf 5y ago
  I'm personally very empathetic to this. Fortunately, I think most "real" developers are pretty restraint regarding this in popular packages' code. Some proper use casees IMHO are: 1. in "terminal" code: scripts, notebooks. 2. function internal variables 3. for making the code look like their counterpart of a paper. idk what to think of 3. if you look at any paper, non of them only uses ASCII, which raises the question, if we're happy with reading papers (even CS ones) with symbols, why not in our code?
  • spicybright 5y ago
    I definitely agree with this. It's just a pain to type out. Maybe I'm behind on this, but needing to use the mouse to find symbols in a huge menu is very painful. You can copy and paste too but again, huge break of flow. Do some editors support discord-style emoji syntax, where typing :fo would bring up a menu of emojis that might match foo. Then hitting enter inserts the emoji over the :foo: representation. You can also not use the auto complete menu. Ex. :pow2: might turn into ²
    • moelf 5y ago
      Julia has the best REPL for this. You can \<type><tab> to type unicode symbol and emoji. Better yet, you can reverse look up how to type a thing: help?> χ²ᵢ "χ²ᵢ" can be typed by \chi<tab>\^2<tab>\_i<tab>
      • dnautics 5y ago
        Yeah. Now go edit your code.
        • leephillips 5y ago
          I can edit it in Vim with no problem.
          • dnautics 5y ago
            Sure, because you have a julia plugin. Not every casual user trying out the language will bother, or want to bother installing someone else's plugin. They'll just hit a function call they need to make with a Unicode character, go WTF man, and give up.
            • leephillips 5y ago
              I don’t have a Julia plugin. I don’t even understand what you think the problem is.
            • bmn__ 5y ago
              > They'll just hit a function call they need to make with a Unicode character This is optional, the language adapts to the capability of the user. He can write ∑ or sum for a function, µ or mu for an identifier. https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/functions/ https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/functions/ You get people riled up in this thread with your false assumption, next time simply ask questions.
              • dnautics 5y ago
                that's for stuff in the stdlib. You can't control library writers, and julia does not force a function identifier that is mapped to unicode to have a "non-unicode equivalent", though, that might be interesting.
                • 5y ago
    • adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      Yeah. Many editors (VS-code, julia repl, atom), support something very similar where I can type in `\ome` tab complete to `\omega` tab complete to ω. (similar completions exist for many other common unicode symbols).
    • leephillips 5y ago
      In the Julia REPL you can type LaTeX commands for Greek letters and math symbols, and a <TAB> converts them to the actual character; so \mu<TAB> gets you a μ. Or you can just input the Unicode directly. I’m constantly doing such things everywhere, so the extra few keystrokes seem worth it to get code where the math looks a more like math. Using the mouse and a menu or character palette is the worst possible solution. EDIT: In general it makes sense to set up your keyboard with a compose key and a “dead Greek” key, and set up your Compose table so the shortcuts make sense to you. Then you can use an expanded set of symbols everywhere, including comment boxes like this one. You can even put things like your email address in your Compose table.
    • vmladenov 5y ago
      If your editor doesn’t help, on macOS ^⌘Space brings up the character picker with the search bar focused for the keyboard, so you can just search the name of the symbol and enter.
    • krick 5y ago
      That might be a problem with your tooling, but most likely not. I know how to do that in Linux (XCompose) and I've heard there are similar tools in both Windows and MacOS as well. So more likely just a problem of not being aware/proficient with using these tools properly. Typing λ² is 6 keystrokes for me, no touching mouse required. And while maybe not very illustrative in this post, I'd argue it's way more readable than lambda_squared when being a part of long and complex formula.
      • spicybright 5y ago
        Absolutely it's my lack of experience in tooling. Never had to type unicode symbols consistently.
  • qsi 5y ago
    I think restraint and common sense are key here (once you're comfortable typing the non-ASCII characters). In parts of my code it's much more intuitive to use \Omega or \Sigma and \mu than giving them ASCII names, and others looking at my code will immediately understand what the matrices and vectors do. On the other hand, if you're going to use \mathfrak{i} to index a simple loop you're doing it wrong.
• dkarl 5y ago
  Physicists, mathematicians, and engineers have been writing µ and u on chalkboards for years with no issues. Why should it be harder on a screen?
  • dnautics 5y ago
    It's not the screen so much as the keyboard that is the problem
    • eigenspace 5y ago
      They’re very easy to type in Julia’s repl, or any text editor with Julia support. You just type \mu and then hit the tab button and you get μ. I actually switch over to my Julia REPL all the time when I’m emailing someone and want to type a greek character.
      • dnautics 5y ago
        > with Julia support. So you can see how this becomes a bit of a barrier to entry.
        • eigenspace 5y ago
          I'm not sure I'd want to do any serious coding in an editor that doesn't have the most basic support for the language I'm using, but to each their own I guess. For new users, if they're not used to writing unicode characters and don't have an editor with nice support, then they don't have to write them. The julia community has a pretty strong convention of giving both unicode and ascii versions of almost all functions. Some packages don't have this convention, but I'm not aware of any big important ones that don't follow it.
        • pjmlp 5y ago
          Anyone that doesn't use a language aware editor is making themselves a disservice.
          • 5y ago
• Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  The thing is, symbols like µ and λ often have well-understood meanings in context, especially when using a particular package. It would be like a programmer complaining about using `i` to iterate through an array or `row` and `col` to iterate through a 2D array.
• abdullahkhalids 5y ago
  Mathematica has many non-latin symbols as well, and it works great. The symbols in my paper are the same symbols in my code. No confusion at all.
  • agucova 5y ago
    Have you had to use Symbolize to make compound symbols?
    • abdullahkhalids 5y ago
      I have not had the need to do it. I have written two large programs, with variables as a[i,j] or as a_{ij} and in both cases Mathematica treats the whole thing as a single symbol. You can also put Greek symbols in superscripts or subscripts and that works just fine. Do you think the Symbolize (or the Notation package) are useful? I don't see any examples in the docs, so hard to tell.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• whatshisface 5y ago
  The right name for a variable is related to what you think the way people will check it will be. In most code the attestation to the correctness of the code is the programmer's understanding of the code. Clearly then names should be descriptive. In contrast, when the attestation to the correctness of a formula is that it is the same as a formula printed in a published paper, then it should look as much like the formula in the paper as possible. A programmer who does not know that rho means density will not be able to catch scientific misconceptions by virtue of the fact that they see the word "density." On the other hand, the will be able to catch differences between the symbols in the source material and the source code. In any code you write, you should be asking, "how will people check this?" If the answer is "by comparing it to something else," then it should resemble the original as much as possible. If the answer is "by thinking about it," then it should be formatted for self-contained comprehensibility. The distinct use cases lead to different best practices.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > but when writing code that is meant to be maintained and read over and over agains it makes a difference if that µ looks too much like a u sometimes. So, if you are maintaining code where that is the idiom, use a font where that isn’t an issue.
• 7thaccount 5y ago
  In certain domains, people will immediately recognize the symbols for delta, lambda, mu...etc. That's how they're written in the textbooks and academic white papers and so on. Seeing the English word is actually more confusing.
• brandmeyer 5y ago
  I'm a mechanical engineer by training, and a software and control systems engineer by trade. IMO, neither alternative is a good one. I prefer to write out the un-abbreviated form wherever practicable. ex: "microradians", "microseconds", "permeability", etc.
• krick 5y ago
  I wish non-Julia community would adopt this practice, because unicode symbols exist for a reason, and using proper symbols instead of making look every language like Perl with unix-style abbreviations that look bogus to pretty much everyone but the most seasoned C-programmers. And complaining u and μ are too similar is like complaining 1 and l or 0 and O are similar. I mean, yes, they are, unfortunately, but if you are noticing it's a real problem for you when writing code, you should probably check out better fonts for your text editor. For the record, I'm not a blackboard addict, I never had a career in academia and I'm not even really a member of Julia community any more than any other person who wrote maybe a couple thousands of LoC in Julia. But I wish people would realize it's not 1970's anymore, and ASCII is culturally outdated. For that matter, I would love if I could write formulas in my code the same way I do on paper, like in that MathJax sample from the article. That's why math notation exists at all, imperfect as it may be (and I hate many things about established math notation, but it's the best we have). I just don't see how it's possible without abandoning plain-text, which I surely wouldn't like because we (currently) don't have tools that would make handling it as effortless, as editing text in Vim.
  • bruce343434 5y ago
    For that to happens common keyboards need to include these esoteric symbols. Yes, esoteric. Who's in the market for a keyboard with Greek alts? Or do you prefer a space cadet keyboard? What if you already have a US-Arabic keyboard which is fairly common? The fact is it's easier to type "mu" instead of "u" (like right now, I can't be bothered to look up "mu unicode", or open the special characters picker, or exhaustively brute force alt-gr key combos to find the mu). Take it a step further, I wish physicists and mathematicians would stop naming their variables so poorly so that only the most seasoned of their field can follow along. Sometimes, like v (velocity) it's quite obvious, at other times I find myself staring at scripts with insane variables like a,o,t_o, etc. And this is a habbit that seems to carry over to non-academic code as well. It's trivial to spot code written by a mathematician because it tends to be incredibly obfuscated. Do you really need to name your constants K_(single letter)? Or can you just write "AIRDENSITY" once and let your editor autocomplete it in the future? The reason I complain about these symbols is because they don't have clearly defined meaning. Maths/Physics had to pull out the Greek alphabet after it exhausted the Latin alphabet (and overloaded most letters with 2 or more meanings) and then promptly molested the Greek one in the same way. Just look at Omega. It's useless. It has been overloaded with so many possible meanings that it has none. Stop naming your variables "omega". Unlike Maths, programming languages support variable names of more than 1 character long.