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Pet Peeve of mine with math: Fisher and Yates have come up with something interesting here, yes. But like most mathematical theorems named after someone, attach
by benmathes 15y ago
Pet Peeve of mine with math: Fisher and Yates have come up with something interesting here, yes. But like most mathematical theorems named after someone, attaching their names to it doesn't help understanding of what it does at all.
I don't name my functions benmathes_foo().
- teej 15y agoAnd quicksort doesn't tell me anything about the algorithm either. It's just a name. Things need to be distinctly identified in a set. That's really the only purpose of a name anyway.
- philh 15y agoAttaching the name doesn't even tell you who came up with it, in general. Unfortunately, it can be hard to generate names which are a) descriptive, b) distinct, c) short. But we've done pretty okay with sorting algorithms, and I definitely feel that more is possible.
- burgerbrain 15y agoTo be fair, the wikipedia page for the algorithm is called "Fisher–Yates shuffle". This is in my experience a common way to call an algorithm. I can't think of a better way to do it.
- benmathes 15y agoAfter putting a few seconds of thought into it, "In place shuffle" explains what it does better than "Fisher-Yates shuffle". I'm not complaining about Fisher or Yates, who are just following the example their/our research community uses.