Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fault1 1660 days ago
Completely disagreed. I was skeptical originally, because I wasn't used to seeing unicode symbols in code, but in certain types of mathematical code, it makes it /far/ clearer because your brain can link to the appropriate symbols in textbooks.

To me, it's a matter of familiarity. clearly human brains can process large amount of symbols. Just look at some east asian languages. Historically, there has been an ASCII bias in computer languages, but that is history.

Mathematics is a /language/, and one of the most universal in humanity because it models certain human reasoning.

1 comments

To your point, for personal projects in Elixir I’ve started using Japanese characters for function names because they can be so much more terse.