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by CJefferson 2039 days ago
In undergrad lectures I constantly have students refering to "fork" or "curly n", or just misnaming different Greek letters (and, I find myself sometimes doing the same). The Greek is (to me) unnessary block to discussion.
1 comments
alexvoda 2039 days ago
And greek letters and emoji have the same issue of dificult type-ability, non-ASCII-ness, dificult printability and dificult displayability. Emoji only add color.

The real solution is normal multicharacter names.

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CJefferson 2039 days ago
I am happy for people to hate emoji, but I don't think non-ASCII-ness is a problem (lots of languages aren't in ASCII anywhere), and in general printing and displaying is easy -- it seems I can type emojis basically anywhere I can type anything else.

True, they don't display well in terminals, but I wouldn't not be willing to limit my maths to an ASCII monospaced terminal anyway, and that isn't how anyone writes or creates maths (unless they are typing LaTeX, in which case it will be nicely formatted anyway). I want super/sub scripts.

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alexvoda 2038 days ago
The reason I mentioned non-ASCII-ness is because top-parent mentioned them:

> Yeah, no. Please don't do this. This has been discussed previously w.r.t commit messages, and I'd argue that the reasons for not doing so with maths are largely the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021

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CJefferson 2038 days ago
I'm sorry, I don't buy any of those reasons.

emoji are perfectly usable by screen readers -- if we really wanted to help people with screen readers we would move on from unstructured terminal output and programs which just dump screens of data. You know that thing that sometimes happens when a program running in the background outputs to the terminal -- that REALLY messes up screen readers.

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alexvoda 2038 days ago
Fair enough. We should make sure software including screen readers properly support Unicode in a useful way. Lack of support in the present is not a reason to avoid emoji. And math notation is already very non-ASCII so arguments related to plain text mode debugging are not applicable. There is probably an argument to be made about color blindness.

But overall my argument is that emoji are not a solution to the problem of very limited naming options for things in math, lack of significance of the symbol used and that of homonymity . The solution is using words. And those words may contain Unicode characters. And alias longer names to symbols on case by case basis.

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