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>> I agree about consistent terminology, but I don't agree with your view that it is a virtue for technical writing to be boring. I don't agree either, I think

>> I agree about consistent terminology, but I don't agree with your view that it is a virtue for technical writing to be boring. I don't agree either, I think it's _not a flaw_, not a virtue! Anyway, all I talk about is the _writing style_, not the content of a scientific paper. That's a different thing. But you can't really teach how to make exciting research contributions. I agree also that repetition is not a flaw in and of itself. Minimalism is a thing, after all. As to older papers, I kind of agree that they are often more pleasant to read, but the problem is that the more people work on a subject, the more new, subtle aspects of the subject become apparent that have to be made clear in writing. Also, this is very unfortunate but terms can become overloaded with time as people use them in different ways. Sometimes I read older papers that seem to take some term for granted, but I find myself being utterly confused about what, exactly, they mean, among many different meanings of the term. For example, some of the reviewers I note above were frustrated with my work complained about my use of the word "predicate", which I was certain at the time can't be misunderstood... but is in fact used in different ways by different communities. Thanks for the interest in my work. My second Machine Learning Journal paper is the much better written one, although it's rather a bit thick with formalisms and proofs etc. and won't be easy to read without a background in logic programming.

kragen 5y ago
Well, I at least agree that being boring is not a fatal flaw in technical writing, where it would be in a novel. So I suppose we don't disagree as much as it seemed at first. I've also run into the same terminological overloading problem. In CS it's especially bad; papers from the 01980s would be already difficult to read for someone who'd only read the recent literature. The worst is when the different meanings are almost, but not quite, the same. For example, I was reading one of Steinmetz's first papers from the 01890s, and he uses the term "inductance" where now we would use "inductive reactance"; at a given frequency these quantities are proportional but the second one varies by frequency. My knowledge of logic programming is not literally zero in that I've written Prolog code a few times and ported μKanren to OCaml in order to understand it, but it's also far from a deep understanding. Still, I'm optimistic about my ability to understand things.
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kragen 5y ago

Well, I at least agree that being boring is not a fatal flaw in technical writing, where it would be in a novel. So I suppose we don't disagree as much as it seemed at first. I've also run into the same terminological overloading problem. In CS it's especially bad; papers from the 01980s would be already difficult to read for someone who'd only read the recent literature. The worst is when the different meanings are almost, but not quite, the same. For example, I was reading one of Steinmetz's first papers from the 01890s, and he uses the term "inductance" where now we would use "inductive reactance"; at a given frequency these quantities are proportional but the second one varies by frequency. My knowledge of logic programming is not literally zero in that I've written Prolog code a few times and ported μKanren to OCaml in order to understand it, but it's also far from a deep understanding. Still, I'm optimistic about my ability to understand things.

deleted 5y ago
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