Naming things by their English name is not more universal than using Greek letters. It's just serving amother group of people who live in a different bubble.
> Many Julia APIs look like Optimiser(η=...) rather than Optimiser(learning_rate=...). This is a pretty unreadable convention.
The learning rate is a well known name that basically every one will understand, on the other hand, "η" or eta, is not even used everywhere in the literature with some papers using alpha instead.
This just looks clever, it's a pretty bad parameter name.
Absolutely! Because as we all know, everyone speaks English.
The GP's point was that greek letters are used in lots and lots of papers even written in other languages. I have read quite a few papers in Japanese that used exactly the same conventions with respect to the greek letters and latin letters used.
Even China, despite their best effort to de-westernize their culture still uses English in their research papers.
And if all the above wasn't enough, Julia's libraries are still all in English so if an hypothetical researcher's English is so poor that they don't know what "learning rate" is, I'd venture that they'll have trouble programming in Julia/JAX/PyTorch.
If you're instead asking of how many can struggle trough an english text supported by machine translators, then that's clearly almost everyone.
There's very often a significant gap between the ease with which the native and the foreign language can be used for reasoning, but surely I don't need to point that out since any bilingual person knows this.
edit: as an example, when programming for Brazilian businesses, we generally just use a mix and match of Portuguese and English like getFinanciamento. "Get" is a technical concept while "Financiamento" is a business concept and it often doesn't make sense to translate either. Best just to leave them both in their respective domain-native language.
In case of maths, Greek IS the domain native language. Now, I wouldn't necessarily enjoy a codebase with Unicode variables for other reasons, but using Greek is best to map directly from the equations.
Flux, the Julia framework that we are discussing, is in English. Its classes, function names, optimizers, everything is in English. Keeping parameters as Greek letters and arguing that it's easier to understand is insanity.
Classes are a programming concept, they do map to the programming domain. Even optimizers and functions probably do map to a named mathematical concept, not to a Greek letter. But prameters probably map to a specific symbol in an equation.
In Mathematica, for instance, we use Greek letters and it allows you to just type an equation in the proper visual form. So much easier to map it when you're working with the actual domain-native names and formats.
I understand the sentiment here, especially as English is not my native language, but for many domains, for anything close to the state of the art, English is lingua franca.
And most of the variables in code still will be in english or other natural language so it is just easier to read english then read math notation mixed with english/other language for MOST (not all) people using underlying software.
[1] https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...
It is - the people who understand the Greek-letter notation will understand the English words but the inverse statement isn't always true.