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Comment by solidasparagus | Hacker News Reader

I dread the day that codebases are filled with unicode and it's up to you to notice that "x ⊗ y" is not the same as "x ⊛ y" or "x ⊗ ȳ".

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I am sincerely of the opposite opinion. Code that I write on a whiteboard or in a paper or in a textbook is much easier to read than ASCII code.

The over bar example you give is a bad notation independently whether it is code or not. But Unicode indices and superscripts are amazingly useful. And .dot and .kron are simply terrible notation compared to the standard Unicode operators for the same operations.

This opinion most likely depends of your field and day job.

When I was at the university, most of the software written here was single purpose, rarely more than a couple thousand lines - you've got the time to actually think about every step of the few algorithms that'll be in there.

My last freelance gig was about delving and fixing performance bugs in a multi-million-line codebase that I'd never seen before, in a few days' time. There is absolutely no time to stop and think about ⊗ vs ⊛ in that case.

Note that this is the main use case of Julia code: relatively short academic code, where more thought goes into coming up with the equations than with the code itself. For me it is not uncommon to spend a week doing the full derivativation of a formula, which is basically a one liner in code.

Not at a week yet, but all of my time is spent on derivations and then translating them to code too.

Scala made this available, it was a mess, so this has been to my knowledge largely ignored by the community. Early Scala projects were rife with this sort of impossible to read or maintain code.

It's one thing to introduce your own notation and another thing to reuse already established mathematical notation.

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