That the original article is directly trying to convince people that programming and math really aren't that different, but you do have to learn the other's culture?
'awk '{print $1'/'$2}' | xargs curl | jq .'
None of the those programs things have any meaningful names. but they're all used in a common programming, or scripting, expression.
If someone says "Oh, you should use Hadoop for that", this is a proposal to solving a problem.
Print is semi intuitive, but it could mean so many things. Print in awk vs print in tcsh might have entirely different behavior. Is there a \n appended? How do you delimit it? It might give you a vague idea, but you're still going to have to go to your informational resource of choice in order to figure out: a) the parameters to pass to it, b) the output formatting/delimiters/implicit \r or \n's, etc. (e.g. Hell, in Python 2 you add a comma to prevent a new-line - I'm not even sure that syntax was influenced from (though logically I can understand the comma-suffix implies additional components and thus you want to suppress any line-break), I'd be hard-pressed to the etymology of that).
Brings me right back to the 'functor' issue. But hey, at least a ML functor is entirely different from C++. They overloaded the term (like delta or mu might be overloaded in math) but at least I don't have the risk of using it and getting 'partially consistent' behavior. (For example, having print exhibit the same properties as bash would plus a side-cases added by the author as 'feature enhancements' which work great for him, but if his side-project gains traction will just lead to more ambiguity.)
Oh! "curl" is "c url". It's taken me several years to understand that, and I knew exactly what it did! I imagined my data "curling" off the website, down the intertubes to my filesystem.
:)
There are two delta functions commonly used in mathematics, the Dirac Delta function, and Kronecker's delta. One is a discrete function, the other is continuous.
Kronecker, a mathematician who was obsessed with the finite, who tried to destroy Cantor's Set Theory, and to some extent, Cantor himself, is unsurprisingly the one associated with the discrete version.
Dirac, a physicist, used in in his book on Quantum Mechanics, and finds lots of use in Physics. Unsurprisingly, it's going to be the continuous version of the thing.
In mathematics, the history of ideas is caught up in the function of the ideas. Sometimes, to understand something, the easiest way is to look back at the problems that resulted in the development of the idea. In times before source control and git blame, it's actually quite helpful to attach the inventor's name to the concept. This is not, of course, the primary reason for the attachment (and many times, the history is more complicated and interesting), but it doesn't mean that it isn't useful.