| >Given the world we live in, right now, why does mathematics continue to insist on minified expressions? Because it is concise, precise, and widely accepted. >Given the option, most development teams would choose to read and write against verbose source code, rather than scrape obfuscated variables and method signatures out of a minified, transpiled, compressed package. What's your point? Source code is not the same thing as mathematics, not for the majority of software and not for the majority of mathematics as practiced by mathematicians. Verbosity makes sense when your domain involves concrete entities like "customers" and "widgets" and "thermal sensors." When your domain involves abstract entities like "ring homomorphisms" and "clopen sets" and "vector spaces," it doesn't. If you're writing a database, a name like "transaction_mutex" is more descriptive than "m." If you're universally quantifying over the domain of an arbitrary continuous function on the reals, "x" is about as descriptive -- and as conventional -- as any name you can come up with. As an aside, I really wish we would dispense with the non-word "transpile." We have a word for translating a program from one language to another: compile. >So why do we continue this archaic practice of obscure, inscrutable symbols in mathematics? Because it works very well. I'm not sure what else to say. You spend maybe fifteen minutes learning about, say, the symbol "∂" when you're introduced to multivariate calculus, and then for the rest of time you have an extremely concise way of expressing a variety of combinations of partial derivatives that can be understood by anyone who has also been introduced to multivariate calculus. Don't get me wrong, there are actual problems with mathematical notation -- overloading, "abuse of notation," and as often as not just plain omitting information -- but the use of non-ASCII symbols and short variable names are not among them. |