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And if you ever do want to edit the code, you have to know the name of every non-ASCII symbol the codebase uses if you want to type out those same symbols witho
by bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
And if you ever do want to edit the code, you have to know the name of every non-ASCII symbol the codebase uses if you want to type out those same symbols without copying and pasting them. If you're not familiar with the material, entering a character like ξ can be a real challenge, and is actually more keystrokes than just typing "xi".
- tagrun 5y agoDifference is 1 keystroke: you type \xi. Why is that a "real challenge"?
- animal_spirits 5y agoThe challenge comes from a person like me, who doesn't know off the top of my head which Greek letter ξ is. So for each of these symbols I'd have to google them and learn it, or have some notepad where I can copy paste the needed symbol
- tagrun 5y agoSo you don't know the Greek alphabet, but write high-performance computing code involving non-trivial math? (Julia's main use case is HPC)
- belval 5y agoThe author example is using the greek letter "eta" instead of spelling out "learning_rate", this is a pretty damning example.
- ShamelessC 5y agoWhat? Did you not read the parent of this thread? > strongly agree with readability in my opinion its cause Academia people live in "bubbles" and they assume everyone knew what a domain specific terms and greek letters means In any case, I program HPC stuff myself with pytorch and no - I don't know the Greek alphabet and probably don't understand "non trivial math". The assumption that these people can't contribute is pretty off-putting honestly. More engineers would join such efforts if there wasn't so much gatekeeping.
- tagrun 5y agoSo you think there's a cabal of "gatekeeper" scientists who are trying to hold the hordes of capable (yet somehow unfamiliar with the corresponding mathematical literature) engineers from making useful contributions to their libraries, because they use the conventional notation from the scientific literature? They should instead tread carefully and dispose of all Greek letters in their code to ensure you are not put off, because that's the real reason that stops you from making useful contributions?
- ShamelessC 5y ago> So you think there's a cabal of "gatekeeper" scientists No. I suggested I myself have seen gatekeeping and referenced your comment as example. Make of that what you will, but don't extrapolate it to a conspiracy theory I didn't suggest.
- dTal 5y agoYou should probably take the time to learn the names of the Greek letters. There are only 24 of them and they're even related to the English ones. It's not a huge time investment, and it's probably worth it if you work in engineering.
- tlb 5y agoWhat editors does this work in?
- tagrun 5y agoJuno, Jupyter support it out-of-the-box. With plug-ins: VS Code (unicode-latex), Atom (latex-completions), Emacs (which has TeX input), Vim (latex-unicoder), ...
- leephillips 5y agoAny editor, on Linux, if you have your keyboard set up to type Greek letters and the Unicode symbols that you use frequently. I can do it directly in the comment box: ξ
- ur-whale 5y agoSure, and that works great with rg and grep.
- leephillips 5y agoFor me it’s one keystroke, with the dead-Greek modifier key. I’ll do it right here, by typing <G-x>: ξ
- fwip 5y agoHow do you go from reading ξ to saying "oh I need to press <G-x>" ?
- leephillips 5y agoBecause I recognized the Greek letter that we usually represent in English as “xi”. In fact I wasn’t sure, but I guessed x, and it turned out to be right. For each letter there’s usually one obvious latin-alphabet equivalent. I bet you know right away how to type α and β.