[forgotpwd16]

>Math is hard to understand.

Because of the concepts used.

>I have to translate every character back to the concept meant by this character

Using emojis for variables won't help with that.

>Every scientific domain has its usual notation for specific concepts

Does that imply each emoji be used for a single concept across all domains? Not only that won't be possible (considering people don't even always use same variable for something, e.g. Pythagorean theorem being a^2+b^2=c^2, α^2+β^2=γ^2, x^2+y^2=c^2, ...) but is also a bad idea even if it could work as it will imply you've to remember every single emoji used.

Again, math is about concepts not what symbol you use for a variable. Using emojis won't make anything easier to teach or to understand.

[beambot]

I find it ironic that your examples were single-character roman & greek letters. Why not Cyrillic? Phoenician?

I wouldn't use pictograms everywhere, but they could be elegant in certain contexts. E.g. having a dedicated pictogram for various base physics quantities (e.g. for mass, length, time, etc).

[qsort]

Because the latin and greek alphabets are widely known and understood, at least an order of magnitude more than Cyrillic and at least seven orders of magnitude more than Phoenician.

This is like asking why I'm writing in English even though it's not my native language, I do that because almost every educated person understands English, while almost nobody would understand if I wrote in Italian.

Pictograms would be difficult to standardize and hard to reproduce, unless you commit to a small set of them, which would just become an alphabet in disguise.

[beambot]

I appreciate the Western convention, but a significant fraction of the world uses pictogram-like written languages (e.g. Chinese). Using pictograms to represent words or concepts isn't that far-fetched.

[alexvoda]

Precisely. As an analogy, the Julia programming language allows Unicode variable names.

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/variables/#man-varia...

[codethief]

Yes, and there is a reason why Chinese is so hard to learn: There are so many characters that learning them takes years.

[alexvoda]

Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion. And the wealth of symbols of chinese script is beneficial to mathematical notation where names are forced to be single character. They are descriptive and diverse which cannot be said about latin or greek letters. But they are foreign to westerners.

The real issue is forcing names to be of single character lenght.

[codethief]

> Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion.

It has everything to do with the current discussion. GP was suggesting that a "pictogram-like written language […] isn't that far-fetched". And I was countering that argument by saying that a large alphabet (a large set of pictograms) is hard to learn or at least takes a lot time, as can be seen from trying to learn Chinese.

That time is much better spent wrapping one's head around the math itself.

[CJefferson]

I'll willing to bet a significant chunk of the "emoji" alphabet is better known and understood than the Greek alphabet nowadays.

It is true you would have to stay in some reasonable-sized subset, and I can't begin to imagine the arguments if someone tried to define "common emoji" or something..

[codethief]

> E.g. having a dedicated pictogram for various base physics quantities (e.g. for mass, length, time, etc).

What if you have two different lengths, one being the distance between two objects and the other being the position of the center of mass over time? What about their two masses? And, in relativity, their two proper times?

Now you're back to using subscripts and the Latin alphabet because what better way to describe the precise object you're talking about in a given language (here: English) than the language itself?

[alexvoda]

>>I have to translate every character back to the concept meant by this character

>Using emojis for variables won't help with that.

Yes, they will, because there is an amount of meaning embedded in the graphical shape of the emoji used whereas there is none for a greek/chirillic/phoenician/etc. character.

But the real solution is to not limit names to a single character.

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527