Re:Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
by User23 on Saturday September 05, 2020 @05:42PM
(#24387087)
Dijkstra wrote extensively on how mathematically illiteracy among working programmers is why software is generally of such poor quality.
He grew up in a world where he could only beg an hour a week of compute time off the Americans so his community put a remarkably high emphasis on software quality and clear semantics.
And that’s really what advanced mathematics is all about: clearly communicating otherwise intractably complex ideas by letting the symbols do the work.
Re:Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
by znpy on Saturday September 05, 2020 @08:04PM
(#24387817)
> And that’s really what advanced mathematics is all about: clearly communicating otherwise intractably complex ideas by letting the symbols do the work.
I agree, and I think you nailed the point perfectly.
The point that the article misses completely.
Thank you.
Re:Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
by OJFord on Saturday September 05, 2020 @06:37PM
(#24387409)
> mathematically illiteracy
I rather enjoyed that!
I think there's truth to it though, even at as high a level of situations where you have logic that leaves you thinking 'ok, this works... but it doesn't actually make sense' where something's hard to understand or debug because it's got tangled up into a functional but illegible mess.
I wonder what Alan Turing would say about this.
On more serious note... Most people confuse software engineering with computer science.
Computer science is a branch of mathematics, software engineering might not be.
Oh and by the way, there's a bunch of mathematics and logic (again, a branch or mathematics) into language recognition and compilers...
Edit: think that many prominent computer scientists were/are mathematicians: think of Donald Knuth or Claude Shannon, for example. They laid the ground for other stuff to happen.