Comment by steego
5 years ago
It's interesting how calling it insurmountable both panders to and insults the people you're talking about.
Maybe a better way to describe the notation is "off-putting"?
5 years ago
It's interesting how calling it insurmountable both panders to and insults the people you're talking about.
Maybe a better way to describe the notation is "off-putting"?
It's not supposed to be insulting. I think the notation is more than offputting, and describing it as a barrier to entry is appropriate.
Like many kinds of formal notation it almost requires a class in a university to have it explained. The same is true of other fields dense in notation where you need to learn the conventions as much as the basics.
In my experience, any sufficiently deep study of any subject requires introduction of at least some degree of specialized terminology ("jargon") to be able to express things precisely and concisely. Sure, you can try to avoid this and use just "generic" language, but you almost always have to sacrifice one or both of these, at least partially. That can very well be worth it in certain cases (e.g. in an introductory text). But the site being discussed here is a list of specific (counter)examples. It would seem counterproductive to me to "dumb it down" given that it's primary purpose seems to be to discuss very specific situations; indeed, one common feature among many of these examples are subtle differences in what things mean in different parts of a language specification -- i.e., one of the reasons why domain experts invariably start using jargon.
That said, of course jargon often is als abused, or used in cases it doesn't have to be, etc. -- that's s bad! And many papers and books suffer from this and would be improved by using less jargon.
But in general I find this negative stance against formal notation, and the expectation that one should be able to dive into subtle and advanced examples without a need of at least some "studying" (not at all necessarily at a university!) quite odd, and unrealistic.
My main question here is: why is conciseness a good thing? Precision is a must, no argument here, but conciseness, to me, seems like a premature, and harmful, optimization. Is it really that much harder to stay within standard ASCII(EDIT: I mean "stay within the characters that the reader already knows how to read", which on the second thought doesn't have to be ASCII at all...)? Do you really need to express concepts with a single strange character? What does it buy you, given that the downsides for readability are quite obvious? There are arguments that using a full word for something would be confusing due to other/overloaded meanings of the word, but then I go read some papers and I see the same ideograms used in drastically different meanings, too.
Jargon is ok. Jargon is what happens when you want to be precise while re-using brain machinery for reading. The exotic notations are, on the other hand, just jargon put in a form which you have to (re)learn how to read, for the sake of conciseness alone. That conciseness may pay off if you're going to be working with the notation 8h/day for 10 years (or a year, or maybe even half a year), but if you just want to read and understand concepts and learn facts... To paraphrase: you wanted a banana, but what you got was gorilla holding the banana and the whole jungle along with it.
Hence my question: isn't creating exotic, one-character == 2.5 concepts, notations simply optimization which is harmful to the vast majority of potential readers?
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I don't get it, do you feel like you need a class in a university to learn programming? Source code is nothing but formal notation. The fact that it kind of looks like English text if you squint makes no difference, as far as I'm concerned. There's only a handful of symbols you have to learn to read type theory stuff.
I believe you that it wasn’t intended to be insulting.
But let’s think about it.
I feel pretty confident that most people on this website are capable of learning the core 2400 Chinese characters in a year if they spent a few hours a day and that’s literally a foreign notation. A lot of people learn new languages all the time.
Kids who don’t want to learn calculus, learn calculus every day. The notation isn’t just awkward, the concepts are too. Yet they learn it.
What we’re talking about is a small notation. It’s a handful of symbols. They work predictably and consistently and the people learning it are usually familiar with the subject on some level.
It’s off-putting because it appears foreign, but the concepts and actual mechanics are already familiar with most of these readers. They just need a Rosetta Stone to help get past the initial awkwardness.
When you look at it from that perspective, it is kind of insulting use a hyperbolic word like insurmountable to a group of programmers.
Many chose not to learn it because they don’t want to be bother or don’t see the value investing their time.
Throwing words like insurmountable around seems like it breeds learned helplessness.
This is coming from my own experience trying to teach theoretical concepts via notation to very smart engineers. I won't argue vocabulary, but I stand by what I say: it's an insurmountable barrier for many people.
Teaching calculus to children is a good example of why. They have a teacher to hold their hands and answer questions 40 minutes a day with mandatory homework assignments.
If you study concepts on your own, you do not have this luxury. Its very difficult to internalize notation when you do not use it every day. The problem is not the notation itself, but the fact that no notation can be categorically searched and referenced. It cannot be typed or entered into google easily. It is rarely consistent between authors, which is free of problems if you are already fluent in the notation.
Sometimes you can get away with "what does upside down A mean" but consider something like `\forall n \in \mathbb{N}`. Imagine if you simply had `unsigned int` (I don't want to debate the exact implication of unsigned int versus the naturals, but it should serve a point).
When I have tried to explain relatively simple notational structures to working engineers, the universal feedback is along the lines of "I wish there was a good reference for notation because I can't understand this or keep up with it."
Pseudo code, or something akin to it, may be more ambiguous but is much easier to grok and document.
As an aside: something that constantly irks me is the celebration of terseness and convenience. This plagues many texts and robs novices and experts alike from understanding. Notation that is terse to the point of resembling arcane incantations is a problem, and it bothers me that academic publications in the applied sciences don't recognize it as one.
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