Re:Think Julia: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
by eggy on Saturday August 18, 2018 @08:01AM
(#17788099)
This why I love J and APL - succinctness of expression, however, these are very same reasons these PLs are criticized. I think if you do a lot of math with symbols, you appreciate them, and if you are a code maintainer, and not a mathematician, it takes getting used to it.
Re:Think Julia: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
by ethelward on Saturday August 18, 2018 @05:52AM
(#17787735)
The only issue here is with input devices. The Greek alphabet is standard Unicode, so it's not more expensive to render or manipulate for your text editor compared to standard latin.
Re:Think Julia: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
by nolemurs on Sunday August 19, 2018 @12:25AM
(#17792592)
To be fair, input devices are a pretty serious issue here. Probably the single most common operation I do on code is search it. If I can't type what I'm searching for easily, that's pretty annoying.
Re:Think Julia: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
by ethelward on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @10:04AM
(#17809627)
> To be fair, input devices are a pretty serious issue here
That's true. I'm currently using an emacs extension that allows me to convert to greek unicode LaTeX-like string (\alpha, \Gamma, ...), butI understand that's more of a hack rather than an actual solution.
I recently wrote a simulator intended as the demonstration of some issues in a paper. I found that using non standard characters enabled me to create a clearer implementation of the calculations in the paper in the code - so I think that it's a great thing that you can do this in Julia and that it should be encouraged.
In 2017 programmers have access to super powerful computers - some cycles to render and enable the manipulations are appropriate? What do people think?