Re:Making math more Lego-like
by traverseda on Saturday March 04, 2017 @12:44AM
(#13789505)
Well, not OP, but that was all very understandable to me, and resonated. I'll try to explain some specific points.
>Why do this rather then define an abstract, human-evaluatable, programming language?
The syntax of math is bad for a number of reasons. Making it some big 3D thing isn't going to make that syntax more reasonable.
Math is a language that could learn a lot from programming languages, even if you don't plan on running it on a computer and dealing with all that hassle.
>Making strange squigles on a page doesn't help. Making strange greek symbols on the page doesn't help.
>Ditch the alphabet soup (and yes, even the 5th centry Greek alphabet soupe)
Math is optimized for paper. This makes it a lot less accessible these days. All these custom glyphs are a damn weird idea. Naming your variables "a" wouldn't be accepted in any other languages.
>Abstract common ideas into "functions".
Once you've abandoned the idea of single-letter variable names, it becomes easier to abstract common mathematical ideas into functions and build a great big library of those functions.
> Use logically derived variable names (even if they're 5-10 characters).
Naming your variables "a" wouldn't be accepted in any other languages, and from the outside looks like a pretty silly idea.
>Phi shouldn't mean 30 things depending on the field you're in.
>Why do this rather then define an abstract, human-evaluatable, programming language?
The syntax of math is bad for a number of reasons. Making it some big 3D thing isn't going to make that syntax more reasonable.
Math is a language that could learn a lot from programming languages, even if you don't plan on running it on a computer and dealing with all that hassle.
>Making strange squigles on a page doesn't help. Making strange greek symbols on the page doesn't help. >Ditch the alphabet soup (and yes, even the 5th centry Greek alphabet soupe)
Math is optimized for paper. This makes it a lot less accessible these days. All these custom glyphs are a damn weird idea. Naming your variables "a" wouldn't be accepted in any other languages.
>Abstract common ideas into "functions".
Once you've abandoned the idea of single-letter variable names, it becomes easier to abstract common mathematical ideas into functions and build a great big library of those functions.
> Use logically derived variable names (even if they're 5-10 characters).
Naming your variables "a" wouldn't be accepted in any other languages, and from the outside looks like a pretty silly idea.
>Phi shouldn't mean 30 things depending on the field you're in.
Choose more descriptive variable names.