this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Why are they even named like this?
When I read code, I want to be able to read it.....
Is this from a time when space was expensive and you wanted to reduce the space of the source files on the devs PC???
For me (with a native language != english), this made it a lot harder to get into programming in the first place.
I recently held a science slam about this topic! It's a mix of the first computer scientists being mathematicians, who love their abbreviations, and limited screen size, memory and file size. It's a trend in computing that has been well justified in the past, but has been making it harder for people to work together. And the need to use abbreviations has completely gone with the age of auto completion and language servers.
Man, I hate that so much. I swear this was half the reason I struggled with maths and physics, that these guys need to write this:
Rather than this:
At some point, they even collectively decided that not having to write a multiplication dot is more important than being able to use more than a single letter for your variables. Just what the fuck?
/s?
Nope.
Bruh how large should our notebook pages be? Also how should we speak about the equation? What if the terms should be represented in a matrix? What if mathematical functions e^x, sin, ln etc. are present? Would you write sine of e^(velocity of the particle B) ? Notations are necessary for readability
I don't know what to tell you. They obliterate readability for me.
I also genuinely believe these shorthands hinder access to research for the 99.9% of humanity who are not experts in the given field. Obviously, you do need to understand the context to use a formula correctly, but that also becomes harder when everything is written with hieroglyphs.
In university, I had to assess this paper. It took me 3 weeks to decipher that alien language, and it doesn't even say anything particularly riveting.
To address your points:
Bonus point: You can reasonably type it on a computer, because you don't need Greek letters and subscripts anymore.
Btw i am all for local aliases. I see them most of the times.
i.e, [equation], where a = area of the surface, v= velocity,...
But without short codes it would be a pain to write and remember. Some of the shortening like del operator really reallh simplifies the original expression with better showcase of physical meaning, but looks alien to people who don't know. But we can't stop using it since it makes everything else difficult for people in that area
You only have to define it once in a document, book, whatever. Also, it's not like you'd ever need to do this for handwritten notes, only for a wider audience, or if you intend for something to be read by not just you.
No one is suggesting you don't use symbols, just that you define them, and not assume the reader uses the same symbols as you. Which, so often, they don't. (How many different ones have you come across just in highschool and uni. I came across multiple)
I'm no physicist, but surely there is a huge range of symbols for the same thing, especially the more niche you get.
I'm not a mathematician, but I agree with you because this is precisely how one would abbreviate repeating terms in a paper (e.g. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) are both located in New York, New York (colloquially, New York City, or NYC). While MoMA has an art collection of about 200,000 pieces, The Met houses 1.5 million works of art.)
Welcome to Greece! No, not our modern Greece, the old timey write philosophical questions into the dirt with sticks and argue with your best homies about it kind of Greece!
Want to compute something? Hope you got all your steps in linear order so you don't have to remember too much in between other steps!
/s (but not really so I totally am on your side, original formulations of math problems are a pain...)