3 ms·

Infix math is only nice because you've been trained to believe it's nice.

dllthomas 13y ago
While I am pretty sure this is entirely true, it's crazy not to recognize that you're producing a language where basically everyone has been thusly trained since kindergarten.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  I question its truthiness. It's not as if there's some shadowy cabal conspiring to force people to put operators in the middle, we developed the infix notation over a long period of time and it seems likely there are good, though possibly not entirely logical, reasons for it. We humans have funny brains, after all. And if you really want to dive down that rabbit hole I think you have to establish that prefix is better than suffix as well. I'm somewhat dubious of even this claim, since I find suffix easier to reason about. But maybe that's just me.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    I think path dependence is plenty to force us into behavioral patterns where alternatives aren't more than marginally better. There may be ways in which infix is genuinely better (I'd conjecture perhaps flexibility of ordering permitting more communication, in terms of emphasis and structure, in the same formula), but I would stand strongly by the notion that the primary reason we respond that it's "nice" is familiarity. This is particularly recalling the trouble some of my peers had with order of operations, but I think if it was flipped and we'd spent a decade dealing with prefix notation before being confronted with infix, while we might find things with prefix notation to struggle with as children we would find prefix "nice" having struggled. I think looking at pros and cons (in the abstract and in people's heads) of prefix vs. suffix could be interesting. What I like about suffix is that you can treat it as a stack. What I like about prefix is that I know what kind of node I'm building as I consider the arguments. I've not done enough of either to have much opinion on which matters more (some lisp, some rpn calculators, but not enough). I certainly wasn't agitating for prefix (in particular) above.
    - breuleux 13y ago
      One argument for infix is that it minimizes the distance between the salient token (the verb) and its arguments. When you see "a := b", the ":=" serves as a convenient visual anchor to check the variable name (to its left) or its value (to its right). Note that English itself is an infix language: "Bob likes Clara" (SVO, infix), rather than "Likes Bob Clara" (VSO, prefix) or "Bob Clara likes" (SOV, suffix). A cursory search tells me SVO and SOV cover 75% of all languages. It would be interesting to see if people speaking SOV languages would prefer suffix notation. I would expect common patterns in (unrelated) world languages to loosely mirror natural dispositions towards syntax. In practice, that's probably a hodge podge of prefix, suffix and infix depending on whether you're dealing with verbs, connectives, prepositions, etc.
      - stormbrew 13y ago
        Somewhat tangentially, I wonder if some of the appeal of object oriented languages is that they usually explicitly mimic SVO. myArray.find(2) is closer to real natural language than array_find(myArray, 2).
        justincormack 13y ago
        Oh but they don't have verbs! http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/execution-in-kingd...
        stormbrew 13y ago
        Well, really, Java has a tendency to take these things to an extreme. Like the author of that post I like that C++ gives you a choice. Of course, usually there's an implicit subject (receiver): this or self. In a language like ruby, which is very very object oriented, and has a similar thing where you always have a receiver to any function call, every instance has a certain set of stuff (the Kernel module) mixed into it that allows for general tasks to be treated as an implicit receiver. It works pretty well for solving this problem on the other side.
mikeash 13y ago
That strikes me as being pretty much the same as saying that English is only nice because you've been trained to believe it's nice, and why not write your language in Klingon instead? When you're dealing with human interfaces, existing convention counts enormously.
- Arelius 13y ago
  > That strikes me as being pretty much the same as saying that English is only nice because you've been trained to believe it's nice, and why not write your language in Klingon instead? There is a reason we don't program in English, and keep inventing new programming languages. English is poor and ill suited for the problem, even though it has enormous existing convention.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Nor do we program in infix math. But we write languages that use both infix math and bits of English where appropriate, because taking advantage of existing conventions helps a great deal.
  - kerkeslager 13y ago
    We don't just use English to write software, but we DO use convention from English. In some sense, keywords like "f" and "j" are better-suited for expressing conditionals and loops because they are shorter to read and type. But I'm sure glad language designers settled on "if" and "for". The reason they did that is convention.
acjohnson55 13y ago
That's not really true. Infix math definitely has its place, particularly for sequences of operations, like monadic chains. It's kind of nice having the input and output on the extremes of the expression, with the parameters attached to the operators, as opposed to prefix notation, which puts the input inside layers of nesting.

While I am pretty sure this is entirely true, it's crazy not to recognize that you're producing a language where basically everyone has been thusly trained since kindergarten.

stormbrew 13y ago
I question its truthiness. It's not as if there's some shadowy cabal conspiring to force people to put operators in the middle, we developed the infix notation over a long period of time and it seems likely there are good, though possibly not entirely logical, reasons for it. We humans have funny brains, after all. And if you really want to dive down that rabbit hole I think you have to establish that prefix is better than suffix as well. I'm somewhat dubious of even this claim, since I find suffix easier to reason about. But maybe that's just me.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  I think path dependence is plenty to force us into behavioral patterns where alternatives aren't more than marginally better. There may be ways in which infix is genuinely better (I'd conjecture perhaps flexibility of ordering permitting more communication, in terms of emphasis and structure, in the same formula), but I would stand strongly by the notion that the primary reason we respond that it's "nice" is familiarity. This is particularly recalling the trouble some of my peers had with order of operations, but I think if it was flipped and we'd spent a decade dealing with prefix notation before being confronted with infix, while we might find things with prefix notation to struggle with as children we would find prefix "nice" having struggled. I think looking at pros and cons (in the abstract and in people's heads) of prefix vs. suffix could be interesting. What I like about suffix is that you can treat it as a stack. What I like about prefix is that I know what kind of node I'm building as I consider the arguments. I've not done enough of either to have much opinion on which matters more (some lisp, some rpn calculators, but not enough). I certainly wasn't agitating for prefix (in particular) above.
  - breuleux 13y ago
    One argument for infix is that it minimizes the distance between the salient token (the verb) and its arguments. When you see "a := b", the ":=" serves as a convenient visual anchor to check the variable name (to its left) or its value (to its right). Note that English itself is an infix language: "Bob likes Clara" (SVO, infix), rather than "Likes Bob Clara" (VSO, prefix) or "Bob Clara likes" (SOV, suffix). A cursory search tells me SVO and SOV cover 75% of all languages. It would be interesting to see if people speaking SOV languages would prefer suffix notation. I would expect common patterns in (unrelated) world languages to loosely mirror natural dispositions towards syntax. In practice, that's probably a hodge podge of prefix, suffix and infix depending on whether you're dealing with verbs, connectives, prepositions, etc.
    - stormbrew 13y ago
      Somewhat tangentially, I wonder if some of the appeal of object oriented languages is that they usually explicitly mimic SVO. myArray.find(2) is closer to real natural language than array_find(myArray, 2).
      - justincormack 13y ago
        Oh but they don't have verbs! http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/execution-in-kingd...
        stormbrew 13y ago
        Well, really, Java has a tendency to take these things to an extreme. Like the author of that post I like that C++ gives you a choice. Of course, usually there's an implicit subject (receiver): this or self. In a language like ruby, which is very very object oriented, and has a similar thing where you always have a receiver to any function call, every instance has a certain set of stuff (the Kernel module) mixed into it that allows for general tasks to be treated as an implicit receiver. It works pretty well for solving this problem on the other side.

mikeash 13y ago

That strikes me as being pretty much the same as saying that English is only nice because you've been trained to believe it's nice, and why not write your language in Klingon instead? When you're dealing with human interfaces, existing convention counts enormously.

Arelius 13y ago
> That strikes me as being pretty much the same as saying that English is only nice because you've been trained to believe it's nice, and why not write your language in Klingon instead? There is a reason we don't program in English, and keep inventing new programming languages. English is poor and ill suited for the problem, even though it has enormous existing convention.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Nor do we program in infix math. But we write languages that use both infix math and bits of English where appropriate, because taking advantage of existing conventions helps a great deal.
- kerkeslager 13y ago
  We don't just use English to write software, but we DO use convention from English. In some sense, keywords like "f" and "j" are better-suited for expressing conditionals and loops because they are shorter to read and type. But I'm sure glad language designers settled on "if" and "for". The reason they did that is convention.

acjohnson55 13y ago

That's not really true. Infix math definitely has its place, particularly for sequences of operations, like monadic chains. It's kind of nice having the input and output on the extremes of the expression, with the parameters attached to the operators, as opposed to prefix notation, which puts the input inside layers of nesting.