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Comment by openrisk | Hacker News Reader

Writing evolved after visual imagery to solve the poor ability of visuals to express abstractions. It too is based on imagery, thats what script is after all, but leverages the emergent social pattern of literacy to convey highly encoded information.

This invention (that we now take for granted) has been so exalted in the minds of earlier generations that they would go to extremes to banish imagery (iconoclasts etc.)

It takes its most extreme form in mathematical script: concise expression of the most abstract ideas.

Commingling imagery and text has its many uses of course: try describing a graph or diagram or a real scene using text only. But for other purposes (literature) its a distraction that forces the brain to switch mode and diminishes the experience.

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> It takes its most extreme form in mathematical script: concise expression of the most abstract ideas.

Yet one thing that these minimalistic text-based interfaces are terrible for is rendering mathematical notation.

> But for other purposes (literature) its a distraction that forces the brain to switch mode and diminishes the experience.

Yet we do not (typically) consume literature in a monospace, typographically impoverished form.

They must live and die by their choices but I am defending the category as a whole. Both limitations can be lifted without altering the essence of a distraction free reading flow.

> Yet one thing that these minimalistic text-based interfaces are terrible for is rendering mathematical notation.

You can notate mathematics using text. In fact the mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps is typically rendered from such text-based notation.

Mathematics is increasingly done using text-based notation (e.g. Lean, Mathematica, SymPy), which I actually prefer because it's typically unambiguous unlike the traditional notation with wildly varying conventions and a lot left implicit or even ill-defined.

> mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps are typically rendered from such text-based notation

What everyone was impatiently waiting for: LaTeX microblogging !

But seriously, a specialized Bluesky client could easily do that for scientific communities - no need to reinvent the whole stack.

One complaint is LaTeX isn't semantic, but visual markup.

Of course. But good luck trying to render LaTeX in a text terminal.

Oh, SymPy looks great!

It is, at least for basic stuff. The biggest problem is that one forgets to solve stuff by hand after getting used to SymPy doing it automatically.

Sometimes SymPy fails at problems that Mathematica can solve though. And Mathematica is expensive pain.

I mean as a mathematical notation, not as a solver.

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