Wait till I start telling you about how we should be using tau as a replacement for 2 pi! In all seriousness, we wouldn't accept this kind of thing in the stan

Wait till I start telling you about how we should be using tau as a replacement for 2 pi! In all seriousness, we wouldn't accept this kind of thing in the standard library of a programming language. Imagine if due to a historical mistake, all arrays reported their length as 2x the number of items in them, and indices would similarly be multiplied by two. So the first item would be a[0], and then a[2], a[4], etc... Now imagine the entire software development world making excuses and justifications. "Oh, it's isomorphic, and shift-left-by-one is cheap!", or "sure, you can only use half of the system memory for any single array, but do you really need more than 2GB of data? 64-bit is common now anyway!" Physics is in a dire need of refactoring, but it has never had it happen. My opinion of studying it was that I didn't expect it to be the "history of physics". I expected to be studying the current state of the art, not the three-hundred-year journey of comedic errors getting there. Imagine starting Chemistry by studying alchemy for years and only then being told -- oh -- there's these things called atoms! Or trying to understand Linux by reading the commit history from day one. Etc...