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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

So you'd never say to someone "use a bubble sort" or "try a bitwise trie" you'd lay it out in full, commented code each time?

When you say "I abstract it in a function" that's surely what a mathematician is doing when they say "then we have a BVP and it naturally follows ...", they're applying the function "treatAsBVP". If you don't understand that step then you go and learn that, just as someone would have to find a library and look at an abstracted function used in your code to understand what it returns.

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> When you say "I abstract it in a function" that's surely what a mathematician is doing

In principle, yes.

In practice, I can right-click on any such function and get to see its source (edit: instantly, automatically) whenever I need it. That doesn't work at all with math papers.

EDIT: Furthermore, when writing about something where bubble sort is used, for the general audience, I would simply link to an explanation of what it is, visualization of how it works and an example code, so that anyone who doesn't know it can quickly get up to speed with it, then I'd explain how exactly that sorting method fits with the rest of topic.

In maths, papers are devoid of any links, the teaching materials are up to 50 years old and never updated to take advantage of new presentation techniques, authors frequently name-drop some algorithm and then forget to say what parameters they used or how exactly it connects with preceding and following paragraphs. It's really bad from UX point of view. That's why sites like BetterExplained are so important.

EDIT2: so, in short, I'd do everything I could - without spending huge amounts of time on it - to make the article as accessible and easy to follow as possible and to make it useful even if someone is not able to understand it whole. I'd really like to see mathematicians to at least try doing the same.

> In maths, papers are devoid of any links, the teaching materials are up to 50 years old and never updated to take advantage of new presentation techniques, authors frequently name-drop some algorithm and then forget to say what parameters they used or how exactly it connects with preceding and following paragraphs.

That there is the crux. If math articles/papers were written in a different medium then you could drill down (right click, view source) from the most abstract level down to the basics. Some kind of tool would need to exist to make this possible.

>In maths, papers are devoid of any links

Not really. Math papers have citations; and important references to prior work are mentioned in the text. It would be a nice quality of life improvement if these were as easy to follow as clicking a link, but relative to the amount of effort you will spend within each link, it is pretty close. Assuming that the referenced paper is in an accessible location; although if it isn't and I need to track it down, I would prefer a standard citation over a broken URL with no archive.

Clickable links are but one of the "quality of life" improvements paper authors could provide - but don't. It's not like there are no tools (like nogbit suggests); for example, Jupyter Notebooks are a document format which can incorporate various kinds of content, from latex typesetting to interactive charts to executable code. The problem is that such tools are simply ignored by most of the paper authors. I do understand some of the reasons for this ((over)reliance on journals for instance), but that doesn't change the fact that it makes for much worse experience for the readers than it could be.

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