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> Think of it as jumping into a new codebase you have never worked with before. It is full of strange functions calling each other for unknown reasons. It takes

> Think of it as jumping into a new codebase you have never worked with before. It is full of strange functions calling each other for unknown reasons. It takes a while to get a good intuition for why. Having done consulting, I frankly disagree. Except pathological cases most of the codebases I've been involved in it's possible to open a file at random at quickly make sense of what happens even without prior exposure. With math papers my experience is that you have to go 3/4 references deep before startit to understand where the notation comes from which wastes hours and hours. They should provide normalized names that could be searched for in e.g. a coq-based database of math concepts or something like that.

gjulianm 5y ago
> With math papers my experience is that you have to go 3/4 references deep before startit to understand where the notation comes from which wastes hours and hours. Most of the time you'd need even more hours to understand not the notation but the concept themselves. In this list there isn't that much weird notation compared to weird words. For example, 'The Krull dimension of a noetherian integral domain is finite'. Even without notation, I'd expect a non-math major to have to go read 8-10 wikipedia pages just to understand "Krull dimension".
benibela 5y ago
And in codebases you can always search/grep for function names, so it easy to find the definition of everything. In math it is a strange symbol in a PDF and you cannot search for at all
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  This is more a limitation of computers and search engines. The move to using more Unicode like in Julia (and hopefully away from PDF to (m)HTML) should make this issue better.
  - benibela 5y ago
    It is also because the notation with single symbols is too short In code someone would write "lightspeed" and that can be searched. In a paper, they write "c" and when you search for it you find thousands of unrelated things.

gjulianm 5y ago

> With math papers my experience is that you have to go 3/4 references deep before startit to understand where the notation comes from which wastes hours and hours. Most of the time you'd need even more hours to understand not the notation but the concept themselves. In this list there isn't that much weird notation compared to weird words. For example, 'The Krull dimension of a noetherian integral domain is finite'. Even without notation, I'd expect a non-math major to have to go read 8-10 wikipedia pages just to understand "Krull dimension".

benibela 5y ago

And in codebases you can always search/grep for function names, so it easy to find the definition of everything. In math it is a strange symbol in a PDF and you cannot search for at all

BlueTemplar 5y ago
This is more a limitation of computers and search engines. The move to using more Unicode like in Julia (and hopefully away from PDF to (m)HTML) should make this issue better.
- benibela 5y ago
  It is also because the notation with single symbols is too short In code someone would write "lightspeed" and that can be searched. In a paper, they write "c" and when you search for it you find thousands of unrelated things.