this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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I recently held a science slam about this topic! It's a mix of the first computer scientists being mathematicians, who love their abbreviations, and limited screen size, memory and file size. It's a trend in computing that has been well justified in the past, but has been making it harder for people to work together. And the need to use abbreviations has completely gone with the age of auto completion and language servers.
Man, I hate that so much. I swear this was half the reason I struggled with maths and physics, that these guys need to write this:
Rather than this:
At some point, they even collectively decided that not having to write a multiplication dot is more important than being able to use more than a single letter for your variables. Just what the fuck?
I would have quit math if I had to do algebra with names instead of letters.
What OP is talking about is readability, so in a situation where you're taking your own notes and have your own set of defined symbols, full words aren't necessary.
I personally lost all interest in math because there are way too many opinionated or non-standard symbol definitions
That seems like a strange reason to quit math since most symbols are pretty well agreed upon, and maths has little to do with the actual notation either way.
I should've said "anything math-heavy," but even then, it seems like switching fields or applications of math requires understanding a new definition of the same symbols, and a lot of that could be avoided with words.
I mean, if you get into any real depth with math, you are going to reach a point where you can't use conveniently use words to describe the symbols being manipulated.
As an example for the math I am doing literally right now, I very much prefer using C^+^~R~ compared to "semi circular arc in the upper half of the complex plane with radius R", or M^+^(f(z)) which means "Maximum of the magnitude of the function f(z) over C^+^~R~", which if I were to write out in full, would just become a clusterfuck.
Also you still wouldn't be able to get rid of symbols because some symbols are placeholders and straight up don't have any meaning in natural language. This occurs often in physics as well, not just pure maths. For example, the laplace transform of any function is written as a variable of "s", but "s" doesn't have a clear meaning (at least as far as I know).