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Spot on. I agree completely. I work at this stuff for a living, and it never ceases to amaze how the academic literature and math papers are discussing fundam

Spot on. I agree completely. I work at this stuff for a living, and it never ceases to amaze how the academic literature and math papers are discussing fundamentally simple ideas using styles and techniques programming evolved past in the last few decades. Comments, structure, not-greek-characters (but they make me look smart!), abstractions. When was the last time you saw a stat/math paper in machine learning with comments/structure? And guess what, its as undecipherable as code without comments/structure. On the other hand, I'm also learning that what I/others find easy, a great deal of people/programmers find hard. The number of programmers/hackers who can actually implement such techniques on new real-world problems if they don't have someone holding their hand I'm discovering is a very small minority. So maybe its harder than it looks after all, and we just think its easy because we've spent so much time with it? After all, programming isn't a walk in the park for most people, and machine learning isn't a walk in the park for most programmers.

bnegreve 13y ago
> When was the last time you saw a stat/math paper in machine learning with comments/structure? And guess what, its as undecipherable as code without comments/structure. What do you mean? Academic papers are usually written in plain english with mathematical formulas when it's necessary. What kind of comments would you like to see?
- dylandrop 13y ago
  Well, to quote the article, you can see things like "p is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesque measure on En" and hundreds of variable names and sub/superscripts, none of which are intuitively named. It's really hard to argue that anyone who is not in academia would understand this without passing through it multiple times. That being said, I think mathematicians should be perfectly permitted to do this, seeing as most people who read their papers are themselves, mathematicians. Thus spelling out every dumb detail would probably just be a waste of their time for the one case that the brave soul who is a programmer tries to decipher it.
  - icelancer 13y ago
    Like another comment above alluded to, mathematicians tend to have parallel gripes about code. While technically we're speaking the same language, the dialect is often quite different.
    - dylandrop 13y ago
      Yes, which is why I mentioned that it makes sense for mathematicians to use the language they do.
kskz 13y ago
A lot of the difficulty in mathematics is trying to come up with the correct, precise definitions for "fundamentally simple" ideas (the French are historically well known for this). There is literally no way to get the precision afforded by mathematics without requiring substantial jargon, it would be like trying to write an entire operating system without functions. Mere intuition doesn't cut it here, we want logically airtight proofs, and for this you need exact definitions and terminology. For example, everyone intuitively knows what holes are. Well, how do you rigorously define a hole? It took centuries to come up with the correct definition, which is given in terms of homotopy groups, and the definition of homotopy groups will look incomprehensible to the non-mathematician. Seemingly "easy" statements like "bounded three dimensional objects without holes are spheres" (i.e. the Poincare conjecture) turn out to be very, very hard (worth a million dollars and a Fields medal!)
wetmore 13y ago
> Comments Papers are not just blocks of equations. There is english giving context. There is also the issue of length limits for a paper. It's assumed that the reader has a background in the area and so the authors can be a bit more concise. > structure Most papers in math follow a common structure of definition-theorem-proof. You can think of lemmas as subroutines that are 'called' in a proof. >not-greek-characters (but they make me look smart!) Unless you're advocating spelling out things (i.e. calling something "decay constant" instead of using an alpha), I don't think there is a fundamental difference between using a Greek or English alphabet. Greek is nice because it gives you more characters to use beyond the English alphabet (which is already used extensively in math). If you _are_ advocating replacing single symbols with words, I think that would be pretty hard to parse, and rather cumbersome in longer formulas. >abstractions Math is _all about_ abstraction. I don't know what you mean by this.

bnegreve 13y ago

> When was the last time you saw a stat/math paper in machine learning with comments/structure? And guess what, its as undecipherable as code without comments/structure. What do you mean? Academic papers are usually written in plain english with mathematical formulas when it's necessary. What kind of comments would you like to see?

dylandrop 13y ago
Well, to quote the article, you can see things like "p is absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesque measure on En" and hundreds of variable names and sub/superscripts, none of which are intuitively named. It's really hard to argue that anyone who is not in academia would understand this without passing through it multiple times. That being said, I think mathematicians should be perfectly permitted to do this, seeing as most people who read their papers are themselves, mathematicians. Thus spelling out every dumb detail would probably just be a waste of their time for the one case that the brave soul who is a programmer tries to decipher it.
- icelancer 13y ago
  Like another comment above alluded to, mathematicians tend to have parallel gripes about code. While technically we're speaking the same language, the dialect is often quite different.
  - dylandrop 13y ago
    Yes, which is why I mentioned that it makes sense for mathematicians to use the language they do.

kskz 13y ago

A lot of the difficulty in mathematics is trying to come up with the correct, precise definitions for "fundamentally simple" ideas (the French are historically well known for this). There is literally no way to get the precision afforded by mathematics without requiring substantial jargon, it would be like trying to write an entire operating system without functions. Mere intuition doesn't cut it here, we want logically airtight proofs, and for this you need exact definitions and terminology. For example, everyone intuitively knows what holes are. Well, how do you rigorously define a hole? It took centuries to come up with the correct definition, which is given in terms of homotopy groups, and the definition of homotopy groups will look incomprehensible to the non-mathematician. Seemingly "easy" statements like "bounded three dimensional objects without holes are spheres" (i.e. the Poincare conjecture) turn out to be very, very hard (worth a million dollars and a Fields medal!)

wetmore 13y ago

> Comments Papers are not just blocks of equations. There is english giving context. There is also the issue of length limits for a paper. It's assumed that the reader has a background in the area and so the authors can be a bit more concise. > structure Most papers in math follow a common structure of definition-theorem-proof. You can think of lemmas as subroutines that are 'called' in a proof. >not-greek-characters (but they make me look smart!) Unless you're advocating spelling out things (i.e. calling something "decay constant" instead of using an alpha), I don't think there is a fundamental difference between using a Greek or English alphabet. Greek is nice because it gives you more characters to use beyond the English alphabet (which is already used extensively in math). If you _are_ advocating replacing single symbols with words, I think that would be pretty hard to parse, and rather cumbersome in longer formulas. >abstractions Math is _all about_ abstraction. I don't know what you mean by this.