4 ms·
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
by 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.
- DNF2 5y agoLong variable names make mathematically oriented code unreadable. A short half-liner becomes a multi-line monstrosity. What you need to understand is that in mathematical code, the variables themselves are of secondary importance, while the structure of the expression is primary. With long names, you cannot see what's going on.
- CornCobs 5y agoJulia allows you to input Unicode characters via latex names though. I think that's a sweet spot of ease of typing and expressivity of characters. Honestly I really hate seeing mu_a, delta_k and company all over the place. If we are gonna name our variables like this might as well give us the actual characters