3 ms·

It doesn’t matter what you think is accessible, it only matters if the person trying to access it thinks it’s accessible. I don’t.

the_af 3y ago
If you can learn how to program, you can learn how to understand this. You first must learn the notation, just as when you learned "def", or "func", or "[x for x in ...]", or "int main() { ... }", or whatever your favorite language's notation is. "Accessible" doesn't necessarily mean "with just knowledge of English, you can jump to this example and immediately understand what it means". Some work is always required; accessible just means this work is not too hard. For example, Python's notation has been occasionally described as "accessible", yet I wouldn't expect my mum to immediately understand a non-trivial Python snippet (so no "print('hello')") without any previous explanations.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  Quiz: what is the opposite of patronising? Because that's what you're being. Not talking down to people but assuming more than is typical. You're clearly highly intelligent, evidently more so than I am. Additionally my mind doesn't work like yours, I'm not an abstract thinker. Plonk stuff like this in front of me and I can decipher it eventually, if I can get some clear statement of the notation and its semantics anyway, and there is stuff in there I'm not familiar with. Most people aren't abstract thinkers. They are motivated by practical concerns. I spent an enormous amount of time reading up on stuff like this and I really can't see the value to it to me as a programmer. It's deeply frustrating because I know it has value, but I just can't use it. It's interesting, I know it's useful, but I can't use it. Please allow that other people think differently and are motivated differently, and don't assume that what's easy for you is for them. I wish I had your cranium.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    > Most people aren't abstract thinkers. They are motivated by practical concerns. Abstract thinking is motivated by practical concerns, namely being able to think comfortably about larger problems without being limited by one's capability for complex reasoning. Most people don't do it because they aren't used to, or they have never been taught how.
  - the_af 3y ago
    > Quiz: what is the opposite of patronising? Humble, respectful, modest? I respect that different people will find different things hard or easy, so that a generalization is never truly possible (except, uh, this sentence?). On the other hand, speaking with absolutely no generalizations whatsoever is simply not possible, because so many caveats and exceptions would make communication impossible. I do stand by my initial assertion that, in general, if you have a mind capable of learning a new programming language, you can learn lambda calculus, and it won't be particularly hard.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  Maybe if you view "programming" as one homogenous block of understanding, but there is a difference between doing basic low-level programming and effectively writing abstract code in Haskell. I can only speak for myself but layers of abstraction make things exponentially harder for me to follow. Compact mathematical notation on top of that feels a bit exhausting. It can probably be called accessible for people already interested or talented in maths, but there's a reason most people don't just casually learn astrophysics for fun even though some introductory material might be considered accessible - not everyone can do it without unreasonable amounts of effort.
  - the_af 3y ago
    > Maybe if you view "programming" as one homogenous block of understanding Oh, I'm not saying it's the same as programming in your favorite language. I'm saying if you have the mental machinery to understand a new language, you also have it to learn lambda calculus. Trust me, it's not that hard. It just looks extraneous out of context because you are not familiar with it. > It can probably be called accessible for people already interested or talented in maths I'm not particularly good at maths and I found introductory-level lambda calculus not very difficult. The notation is different from, say, a C program. You just learn this notation, which your professor will explain. Nothing too terrible. > layers of abstraction I'm confused. Which layers of abstraction? I mean, it's an abstraction just like C or Python or "1 + 1" are abstractions. There are rules and you learn how to apply them.
    - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
      It's about the entire set of formalisms given in the pdf, not just lambda calculus. The argument here about LC was because I had just given a snippet of it, but it's not the whole paper. Now, the next bit – so I've spent my 15 minutes reading up on each of these formalisms (lambda calculus, intuitionistic logic, Hoare notation, whatever else). So now I can read the paper and I do, and now I have absolutely no way of making use of anything I've learnt. I spent personally a lot of time on the computer science side of things, and I have got frankly just about nothing out of it. So frankly again, there's no point learning it (from a utilitarian perspective). When I was a kid I picked up a book on Fortran 4 and tried to learn it from the book, without a computer. That's pretty much the situation here – a passive notation that, had I managed to internalise it, would have been completely useless because I had no computer to run it on. And I'm tired of this discussion of people saying it's easy and it's useful, because it's not easy, and it's not useful without a whole lot more studying an application to bridge the abstraction of the formalism to the actual programming environment where I can use it. Please just stop repeating stuff.

the_af 3y ago

If you can learn how to program, you can learn how to understand this. You first must learn the notation, just as when you learned "def", or "func", or "[x for x in ...]", or "int main() { ... }", or whatever your favorite language's notation is. "Accessible" doesn't necessarily mean "with just knowledge of English, you can jump to this example and immediately understand what it means". Some work is always required; accessible just means this work is not too hard. For example, Python's notation has been occasionally described as "accessible", yet I wouldn't expect my mum to immediately understand a non-trivial Python snippet (so no "print('hello')") without any previous explanations.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
Quiz: what is the opposite of patronising? Because that's what you're being. Not talking down to people but assuming more than is typical. You're clearly highly intelligent, evidently more so than I am. Additionally my mind doesn't work like yours, I'm not an abstract thinker. Plonk stuff like this in front of me and I can decipher it eventually, if I can get some clear statement of the notation and its semantics anyway, and there is stuff in there I'm not familiar with. Most people aren't abstract thinkers. They are motivated by practical concerns. I spent an enormous amount of time reading up on stuff like this and I really can't see the value to it to me as a programmer. It's deeply frustrating because I know it has value, but I just can't use it. It's interesting, I know it's useful, but I can't use it. Please allow that other people think differently and are motivated differently, and don't assume that what's easy for you is for them. I wish I had your cranium.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  > Most people aren't abstract thinkers. They are motivated by practical concerns. Abstract thinking is motivated by practical concerns, namely being able to think comfortably about larger problems without being limited by one's capability for complex reasoning. Most people don't do it because they aren't used to, or they have never been taught how.
- the_af 3y ago
  > Quiz: what is the opposite of patronising? Humble, respectful, modest? I respect that different people will find different things hard or easy, so that a generalization is never truly possible (except, uh, this sentence?). On the other hand, speaking with absolutely no generalizations whatsoever is simply not possible, because so many caveats and exceptions would make communication impossible. I do stand by my initial assertion that, in general, if you have a mind capable of learning a new programming language, you can learn lambda calculus, and it won't be particularly hard.
alpaca128 3y ago
Maybe if you view "programming" as one homogenous block of understanding, but there is a difference between doing basic low-level programming and effectively writing abstract code in Haskell. I can only speak for myself but layers of abstraction make things exponentially harder for me to follow. Compact mathematical notation on top of that feels a bit exhausting. It can probably be called accessible for people already interested or talented in maths, but there's a reason most people don't just casually learn astrophysics for fun even though some introductory material might be considered accessible - not everyone can do it without unreasonable amounts of effort.
- the_af 3y ago
  > Maybe if you view "programming" as one homogenous block of understanding Oh, I'm not saying it's the same as programming in your favorite language. I'm saying if you have the mental machinery to understand a new language, you also have it to learn lambda calculus. Trust me, it's not that hard. It just looks extraneous out of context because you are not familiar with it. > It can probably be called accessible for people already interested or talented in maths I'm not particularly good at maths and I found introductory-level lambda calculus not very difficult. The notation is different from, say, a C program. You just learn this notation, which your professor will explain. Nothing too terrible. > layers of abstraction I'm confused. Which layers of abstraction? I mean, it's an abstraction just like C or Python or "1 + 1" are abstractions. There are rules and you learn how to apply them.
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    It's about the entire set of formalisms given in the pdf, not just lambda calculus. The argument here about LC was because I had just given a snippet of it, but it's not the whole paper. Now, the next bit – so I've spent my 15 minutes reading up on each of these formalisms (lambda calculus, intuitionistic logic, Hoare notation, whatever else). So now I can read the paper and I do, and now I have absolutely no way of making use of anything I've learnt. I spent personally a lot of time on the computer science side of things, and I have got frankly just about nothing out of it. So frankly again, there's no point learning it (from a utilitarian perspective). When I was a kid I picked up a book on Fortran 4 and tried to learn it from the book, without a computer. That's pretty much the situation here – a passive notation that, had I managed to internalise it, would have been completely useless because I had no computer to run it on. And I'm tired of this discussion of people saying it's easy and it's useful, because it's not easy, and it's not useful without a whole lot more studying an application to bridge the abstraction of the formalism to the actual programming environment where I can use it. Please just stop repeating stuff.