Comment by tim333
15 days ago
Although if you look at most maths textbooks or papers there's a fair bit of English waffle per equation. I guess both have their place.
15 days ago
Although if you look at most maths textbooks or papers there's a fair bit of English waffle per equation. I guess both have their place.
People definitely could stand to write a lot more comments in their code. And like... yea, textbook style prose, not just re-stating the code in slightly less logical wording.
Yes exactly. Or like signposts on a road.
"You came from these few places, you might go to these few places, watch out for these bugbears if you go down that one path."
Welcome to the world of advocating for Literate Programming:
http://literateprogramming.com/
As somebody that occasionally studies pure math books those can be very, very light on regular English.
That makes them much easier to read though, its so hard to find a specific statement in English compared to math notation since its easier to find a specific symbol than a specific word.
Textbooks aren't just communicating theorems and proofs (which are often just written in formal symbolic language), but also the language required to teach these concepts, why these are important, how these could be used and sometimes even the story behind the discovery of fields.
So this is far from an accurate comparison.
> Textbooks aren't just communicating theorems and proofs
Not even maths papers, which are vehicle for theorem's and proofs, are purely symbolic language and equations. Natural language prose is included when appropriate.
Theorems and proofs are almost never written in formal symbolic language.
My experience in reading computer science papers is almost exactly the opposite of yours: theorems are almost always written in formal symbolic language. Proofs vary more, from brief prose sketching a simple proof to critical components of proofs given symbolically with prose tying it together.
(Uncommonly, some papers - mostly those related to type theory - go so far as to reference hundreds of lines of machine verified symbolic proofs.)
3 replies →
Yes, plain language text to support and translate symbology to concepts facilitates initial comprehension. It's like two ends of a connection negotiating protocols: once agreed upon, communication proceeds using only symbols.