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Comment by playing_colours | Hacker News Reader

Is interest in GA just a local fashion or there are objective reasons in recent revival of interest?

I think it's both. Still, in the manner it's happening, the surging abundance of tutorials on Geometric Algebra somehow feels worrisome. This looks all too similar to the ever growing number of guides on what are monads and how to use them in programming. For most people - kind of makes sense, sort of interesting, sometimes inspiring, practically useless...

Why does it worry you?

This is almost like, for instance, why are there so many popular accounts on quantum mechanics (and new ones keep popping up every so often). This makes me think they are all wrong somehow (and to a significant degree they indeed are - which is quite understandable in this case, as QM is a tricky subject); looks like that's what the author of the next one should think, too.

If you're using a functional programming languages, monads are actually quite useful. It's not just a theoretical thing.

I can see how you might not want to use them in JavaScript (although many folks do), but it's quite natural to use them in Scala, Haskell, or OCaml.

Read a little bit of the introduction. If you are familiar with using complex numbers and vector cross products, you will see the advantage pretty quickly

I also have noticed the sudden and relatively intense interest in this subject: there have been at LEAST 3-4 front-page-ranking links on HN in just the past week (that I've seen at least). An interesting spontaneous zeitgeist in the comp-sci & related communities.

I never got the hang of direction of cross products, still don't know which hand rules to use for eg motors & generators (well I think I knew once but as never at ease).

This looks like what I wished I had learned instead!

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