Don't agree with this, it took a few weeks of physics classes to get used to using greek letters as variables, and without them you'd drown in re-used letters.
> it took a few weeks of physics classes to get used to using greek letters as variables
That's a very small price if you're actually involved with physics regularly, but HN is a relatively mainstream place.
I had physics for 4 years in school but this wasn't part of the curriculum. At some point I asked why we were told (seemingly-to-me falsely) that there were only 3 phases of matter when on google videos I had seen something about superfluidity. The teacher made a joke about my stumbling over that word and then the buzzer went so... that's the kind of physics we had.
And that's for someone who went to school in one of the richest (GDP per capita) and most-developed (HDI) countries in the world. I don't know what it's like for anyone tuning in from a less well-off place, or for someone who had physics decades ago without refreshers (for me it's only a bit more than one decade now).
Something tells me I should have looked for a statistics paper that replaced GDP and HDI with some random symbol and used that instead. That's the kind of thing you're promoting and I just don't see why. TLAs aren't everything but they're better than single letters.
> without them you'd down in re-used letters
eh, literally the opposite? Using (abbreviated) names you'd not drown in re-used letters.
well the abbreviated names include the letters, you can get in trouble when questions tend to have many symbols appended together.
I should clarify, though, that I was thinking of college physics classes, which are definitely more mature, both about exploring new knowledge instead of memorizing facts, and about learning to actually speak in the experts' language.
Using symbols for common concepts without defining them is, however, absurd. (Not counting a few -- c, e, hbar, m, maybe q?)
That's a very small price if you're actually involved with physics regularly, but HN is a relatively mainstream place.
I had physics for 4 years in school but this wasn't part of the curriculum. At some point I asked why we were told (seemingly-to-me falsely) that there were only 3 phases of matter when on google videos I had seen something about superfluidity. The teacher made a joke about my stumbling over that word and then the buzzer went so... that's the kind of physics we had.
And that's for someone who went to school in one of the richest (GDP per capita) and most-developed (HDI) countries in the world. I don't know what it's like for anyone tuning in from a less well-off place, or for someone who had physics decades ago without refreshers (for me it's only a bit more than one decade now).
Something tells me I should have looked for a statistics paper that replaced GDP and HDI with some random symbol and used that instead. That's the kind of thing you're promoting and I just don't see why. TLAs aren't everything but they're better than single letters.
> without them you'd down in re-used letters
eh, literally the opposite? Using (abbreviated) names you'd not drown in re-used letters.