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I think the fact that the author somehow thinks that Greek letters are prettier and easier to understand hints at an enormous bias. Many people would not know
by pierrebai 3y ago
I think the fact that the author somehow thinks that Greek letters are prettier and easier to understand hints at an enormous bias.
Many people would not know their names, most people are probably unfamiliar to Greek letters beyond beta or gamma, with some exceptions for pi, which has the dubious property of being confusingly ambiguous if the constant is meant or a simple high-brow variation on a variable named p.
It's my conviction that there are a lot of things in computing that are made harder than they necessarily need to be by bad naming and chief amongst them is the insistence on borrowing mathematical notations and jargon.
In my mind, it is mostly a question of elitism and exclusion.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoCode should be easy to read to the relevant parties. If you're doing scientific code, the relevant parties know the math, and coming up with your own creative name merely obfuscates the meaning. It's not like programming is completely devoid of terms of the art already. What's a Class? or an Object? or a Map? Etc. Etc.
- whateveracct 3y agoI find this sort of thing mostly for fun. Sometimes your code is your code so who cares.
- jlg23 3y agoThat "enormous bias" could also simply be that someone is using polar coordinates a lot. It's hard to not encounter rho and theta in literature about it... That's just one example, Greek letters have been used in science for a very long time and I personally find code that uses the same notation used in literature easier to reason about and much more pleasant to read.