4 ms·

You weren’t asking for a glossary. You were asking that people stop using Greek letters. Aside from that, there are references that will tell you what these sy

You weren’t asking for a glossary. You were asking that people stop using Greek letters. Aside from that, there are references that will tell you what these symbols mean. You just have to look them up. “What does capital omega mean in algorithms?” will get you what you need here. The comparison with programming languages doesn’t quite hold in this sense. There are glossaries for programming symbols and terms, but they are not collocated with the code. Just as we don’t expect someone to put a glossary in every GitHub repo, we also don’t expect people to put a glossary in every math paper. Like code on GitHub, the paper is written primarily for people who understand the language. If you want to learn what something means, you can look it up somewhere.

insanitybit 3y ago
> You were asking that people stop using Greek letters. In an ideal world it would be both. But the worst case scenario is definitely greek letters that are assumed to be known. > You just have to look them up. “What does capital omega mean in algorithms?” will get you what you need here. lol yeah? Do that with δ and you'll get numerous unrelated results + tons of indecipherable maths. Even with Omega you'll get a wikipedia page that's full of other mathemetical symbols. I've done this all, I've got index cards of category theory symbols so that I can read this sort of thing and it's an utter waste of time. The thing is that programmers aren't writing code for the audience of academics and I think that's very reasonable. Why are academics not writing for the audience of programmers? That feels far less reasonable.
- kweingar 3y ago
  > The thing is that programmers aren't writing code for the audience of academics and I think that's very reasonable. Why are academics not writing for the audience of programmers? That feels far less reasonable. I think this is the core of the issue. The audience here is researchers in the field of random algorithms. Why do you think that it should also be readable by a layman programmer without any study or background knowledge in random algorithms? 99.999% of programmers will never implement invertible Bloom lookup tables. The few that will have studied the math. Seems like a fine arrangement to me
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    As I said before, I believe that one of the values of research in a domain is the ability for practitioners of that domain to execute on said research. > 99.999% of programmers will never implement invertible Bloom lookup tables. I have actually gone through a bloom filter paper in order to implement it before, with zero math background. I had to teach myself a bunch of irrelevant shit and build my own glossary - absolutely waste of time and it made the whole thing far more daunting. More programmers would likely implement the constructs described in papers were they more approachable. > Seems like a fine arrangement to me To my knowledge, it is a well known problem that academic papers rarely turn into practical applications. I believe that the approachability of papers is a major component.

insanitybit 3y ago

> You were asking that people stop using Greek letters. In an ideal world it would be both. But the worst case scenario is definitely greek letters that are assumed to be known. > You just have to look them up. “What does capital omega mean in algorithms?” will get you what you need here. lol yeah? Do that with δ and you'll get numerous unrelated results + tons of indecipherable maths. Even with Omega you'll get a wikipedia page that's full of other mathemetical symbols. I've done this all, I've got index cards of category theory symbols so that I can read this sort of thing and it's an utter waste of time. The thing is that programmers aren't writing code for the audience of academics and I think that's very reasonable. Why are academics not writing for the audience of programmers? That feels far less reasonable.

kweingar 3y ago
> The thing is that programmers aren't writing code for the audience of academics and I think that's very reasonable. Why are academics not writing for the audience of programmers? That feels far less reasonable. I think this is the core of the issue. The audience here is researchers in the field of random algorithms. Why do you think that it should also be readable by a layman programmer without any study or background knowledge in random algorithms? 99.999% of programmers will never implement invertible Bloom lookup tables. The few that will have studied the math. Seems like a fine arrangement to me
- insanitybit 3y ago
  As I said before, I believe that one of the values of research in a domain is the ability for practitioners of that domain to execute on said research. > 99.999% of programmers will never implement invertible Bloom lookup tables. I have actually gone through a bloom filter paper in order to implement it before, with zero math background. I had to teach myself a bunch of irrelevant shit and build my own glossary - absolutely waste of time and it made the whole thing far more daunting. More programmers would likely implement the constructs described in papers were they more approachable. > Seems like a fine arrangement to me To my knowledge, it is a well known problem that academic papers rarely turn into practical applications. I believe that the approachability of papers is a major component.