5 ms·
Difference is 1 keystroke: you type \xi. Why is that a "real challenge"?
by tagrun 4y ago
Difference is 1 keystroke: you type \xi. Why is that a "real challenge"?
- animal_spirits 4y 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 4y 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 4y agoThe author example is using the greek letter "eta" instead of spelling out "learning_rate", this is a pretty damning example.
- ShamelessC 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y agoWhat editors does this work in?
- tagrun 4y 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 4y 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 4y agoSure, and that works great with rg and grep.