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> The learning rate is a well known name that basically every one will understand Absolutely! Because as we all know, everyone speaks English. The GP's point
by melissalobos 4y ago
> The learning rate is a well known name that basically every one will understand
Absolutely! Because as we all know, everyone speaks English.
The GP's point was that greek letters are used in lots and lots of papers even written in other languages. I have read quite a few papers in Japanese that used exactly the same conventions with respect to the greek letters and latin letters used.
- belval 4y agoHow many researchers in the ML/DL community don't speak English? I don't have hard numbers but I highly doubt that it's a significant proportion. What is the reach of your Japanese papers when almost no-one outside of Japan can read Japanese? Even China, despite their best effort to de-westernize their culture still uses English in their research papers. And if all the above wasn't enough, Julia's libraries are still all in English so if an hypothetical researcher's English is so poor that they don't know what "learning rate" is, I'd venture that they'll have trouble programming in Julia/JAX/PyTorch.
- SiempreViernes 4y agoHow many don't speak it as a native language? Quite a lot as most of the world uses something else as their primary language. If you're instead asking of how many can struggle trough an english text supported by machine translators, then that's clearly almost everyone. There's very often a significant gap between the ease with which the native and the foreign language can be used for reasoning, but surely I don't need to point that out since any bilingual person knows this.
- belval 4y agoThe programming language is already in English, implying that using greek letters to map to math concepts is easier to understand for non-native is disingenuous.
- doliveira 4y agoIt's really not. There are just a few programming language-specific keywords that you have to memorize, unlike infinite possible combinations of English words for parameters. edit: as an example, when programming for Brazilian businesses, we generally just use a mix and match of Portuguese and English like getFinanciamento. "Get" is a technical concept while "Financiamento" is a business concept and it often doesn't make sense to translate either. Best just to leave them both in their respective domain-native language. In case of maths, Greek IS the domain native language. Now, I wouldn't necessarily enjoy a codebase with Unicode variables for other reasons, but using Greek is best to map directly from the equations.
- belval 4y agoI am not debating the merits of writing your business logic in whatever language that you want. Flux, the Julia framework that we are discussing, is in English. Its classes, function names, optimizers, everything is in English. Keeping parameters as Greek letters and arguing that it's easier to understand is insanity.
- doliveira 4y agoI am replying to a comment in which you were talking in general terms. Maybe it's insanity because typing Greek symbols in most general-purposes IDEs is hard, querying it in search engines can be tough, etc. Not because it's mixed with English names. Classes are a programming concept, they do map to the programming domain. Even optimizers and functions probably do map to a named mathematical concept, not to a Greek letter. But prameters probably map to a specific symbol in an equation. In Mathematica, for instance, we use Greek letters and it allows you to just type an equation in the proper visual form. So much easier to map it when you're working with the actual domain-native names and formats.
- 127 4y agoGoogle Translate is one click away. I can easily translate both Japanese and Chinese comments and variable names to get the gist of it. Using single hieroglyphs for it makes the entire endeavor impossible.
- omegalulw 4y ago> Absolutely! Because as we all know, everyone speaks English. I understand the sentiment here, especially as English is not my native language, but for many domains, for anything close to the state of the art, English is lingua franca.