Re:Problems of Traditional Math Notation (2004)
by Grustaf on Monday November 06, 2017 @03:41PM
(#15638822)
It doesn't create a barrier, except possibly for people from CS. I learned math before programming and it really struck me how much more OCD programmers are. Math notation is fine, ambiguity is not an issue, it's a strength. People only have philosophical objections to it.
Contrived examples of ambiguous expressions like in the article are pointless, since there are always non-ambiguous ways to write the same thing.
The flexibility of math notation makes it flow much better, you can vary the level of verbosity to suit the context. There are even conventions around variables names, so that no one would misunderstand an expression such as f = x^2 and think that f is a constant.
It's a beautiful, intuitive, highly efficient system evolved over millennia. It might not be perfect but if someone had come up with an improvement it would have been implemented already.
Contrived examples of ambiguous expressions like in the article are pointless, since there are always non-ambiguous ways to write the same thing.
The flexibility of math notation makes it flow much better, you can vary the level of verbosity to suit the context. There are even conventions around variables names, so that no one would misunderstand an expression such as f = x^2 and think that f is a constant.
It's a beautiful, intuitive, highly efficient system evolved over millennia. It might not be perfect but if someone had come up with an improvement it would have been implemented already.