Hacker News Reader

This is hilarious to me. I have always found notation used outside of math hideous.

Compare any math notation to the notation used in operational semantics or proving things about type environments.

Compare any math notation to the logic notation used in philosophy.

Hideous, all hideous, I say!

> Compare any math notation to the logic notation used in philosophy.

Aren't they the same? I assume that by "logic notation used in philosophy" you mean the kind that's used by Carnap, Kripke, etc.

Logic in philosophy is used in a lot of fields of humanities and social sciences too. When you have inductions and deductions based on qualitative axioms what you write is going to take a lot of brainpower to understand. A lot of the academic work in those fields takes thousands of words to explain all the thinking behind something that could be broadly explained in a paragraph.

No, I don't think this is what eximius was talking about. I think the kind you're talking about does not use any symbolic notation.

Admittedly, my exposure was brief and I certainly don't know the notation by any name, but the logic courses used drastically different notation from what I was used to in my math classes. Some of the symbols were the same, sometimes they had the same meanings, sometimes not. Often there were different symbols entirely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com