[sgt101]

there's an interesting issue wrt. maths and Juila; yesterday there was a story : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17781475 on unmaintainable code. One of the clauses mentions the use of non standard characters as variable names : δ σ π ρ for example and cites the issue as having to deal with the code in a simple text editor.

I recently wrote a simulator intended as the demonstration of some issues in a paper. I found that using non standard characters enabled me to create a clearer implementation of the calculations in the paper in the code - so I think that it's a great thing that you can do this in Julia and that it should be encouraged.

In 2017 programmers have access to super powerful computers - some cycles to render and enable the manipulations are appropriate? What do people think?

[eggy]

This why I love J and APL - succinctness of expression, however, these are very same reasons these PLs are criticized. I think if you do a lot of math with symbols, you appreciate them, and if you are a code maintainer, and not a mathematician, it takes getting used to it.

[ethelward]

The only issue here is with input devices. The Greek alphabet is standard Unicode, so it's not more expensive to render or manipulate for your text editor compared to standard latin.

[nolemurs]

To be fair, input devices are a pretty serious issue here. Probably the single most common operation I do on code is search it. If I can't type what I'm searching for easily, that's pretty annoying.

[ethelward]

> To be fair, input devices are a pretty serious issue here

That's true. I'm currently using an emacs extension that allows me to convert to greek unicode LaTeX-like string (\alpha, \Gamma, ...), butI understand that's more of a hack rather than an actual solution.