Exactly. Making it harder to read, write and understand on purpose, unless you're a part of a specific small exclusive club. There's absolutely no reason.
It's becoming a pet peeve of mine how HN conflates a solid, classical mathematical education with some kind of gatekeeping club. Anyone is welcome to join. Anyone is welcome not to use this language if they wish. But please don't dictate how us mathematicians are supposed to communicate.
Calling this mathematical education makes me doubt your implicit claim of pedagogical ability.
I think a lot of math could be taught with a lot less overhead and in more understandable fashion. It's just that the natural incentives seem to drive people to unnecessary overhead and barriers for those who actually want to learn.
Lot of the language and symbols involved could be streamlined. But like QWERTY keyboard and C++, you would first have to turn this huge hulking ship of legacy cruft into that direction.
Ok. Have at it, I guess.
> Lot of the language and symbols involved could be streamlined. But like QWERTY keyboard and C++, you would first have to turn this huge hulking ship of legacy cruft into that direction.
This screams a fundamental misunderstanding of mathematics. The symbols need context to make any sense whatsoever. To a reader with intimate knowledge of the context, the symbols convey lots of information very efficiently. That doesn't mean that the symbols are understandable without context, or even that they could be made understandable without context.
Using in-group context-sensitive symbols is by definition exclusive. Using descriptive well thought out names is inclusive.
Math as a language seems very needlessly compressed. Imagine a world where programmers invented a new symbol for every function and you would have to look up what they mean, but when you look up what they mean, you would have to look up 10 other symbols. Most of those symbols refer back to symbols where you came from in the first place. It's a detriment for learning. Simple as that.
Not everybody wants to be a mathematician. Some people just want to get work done and read through a bunch of research papers.
Are you saying the whole field of mathematics (and physics) is wrong, and we're doing something "meaningless"?
> Using in-group context-sensitive symbols is by definition exclusive. Using descriptive well thought out names is inclusive.
Not when the group is open to anyone who wants to join. Math is probably the most "open source" field out there. Barring the very cutting edge front of research, everything can be learned from free sources or ones that can be borrowed for free from libraries, or had through very very cheap second hand material.
That there is a high barrier to entry when it comes to effort isn't some malicious gatekeeping design. It's just because some things are hard.
> Math as a language seems very needlessly compressed. Imagine a world where programmers invented a new symbol for every function and you would have to look up what they mean, but when you look up what they mean, you would have to look up 10 other symbols.
You clearly have never done math! The way it works requires intimate familiarity with the definitions of the symbols. Once you actually manage to internalize that (it can be a lot of work), remembering what the symbols stand for comes for free.
> Not everybody wants to be a mathematician. Some people just want to get work done and read through a bunch of research papers.
"Not everyone wants to be a surgeon, some people just wanna read medical research papers."
"Not everyone wants to be an astrophysicist, some people just wanna read astrophysics papers."
Do you not see how ridiculous this is? Nobody is gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping. You're conflating gatekeeping with something just being hard, and the practitioners of the hard thing not wanting to change the way we work to accommodate non-practitioners (to our own detriment!)
All I'm seeking here is how to improve communicating math without having to go through the credentialism of higher education.
edit: Why you didn't understand my comment on reading papers: some computer science papers require heavy math background. A lot of math is actually applied math.
Lastly:
> All I'm seeking here is how to improve communicating math without having to go through the credentialism of higher education.
Like I've already pointed out: mathematics is perhaps the most "open source" field there is. There's no need to go through the "credentialism" if you don't want to. Again you're just conflating math being hard with it being protected by some imagined wall of credentialism guarded by gatekeepers.
I think it's just the opposite. People familiar with the relevant math have, most likely, worked with this stuff in other programming languages and never used math symbols in their code.
I'm used to seeing θ or α in text and theta or alpha in code. The combination of Greek letters and for loops looks very weird.
(Seriously talking: From an educational point of view, lowest common deminator is exactly what you want, as long as you can communicate the entire concept effectively)
The options aren't just complete beginner vs math PhD though. Imagine an experienced software developer who has written these kinds of algorithms in other languages and has never used latex. That's the kind of person you're also keeping out. Are they "the lowest common denominator"?
I also don't know why you assumed that the people who are most likely to use this code like this are automatically people who already know the glyphs.
It's gatekeeping not just because there is barrier to entry. It's because that barrier is artificial, unnecessary and comes with a smug feeling of superiority (you aren't the first person to use "lowest common denominator" in this thread).