Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hutzlibu 1364 days ago
Yeah, when doing it with hand, I surely would shorten it. But when doing math on the computer with help of autocomplete, why not? But well, I do not really know if that in pure math shape exists, I am only doing Math in the context of programming.

And for pedagogic purposes, I do would like more meaningful names at times.

1 comments

It's definitely a lot harder to read and make sense of an equation that is sprawled out. In some domains, I would contend that using greek letters in code would increase readability, especially for those familiar with the underlying formula, and especially if the code is not edited frequently (e.g. implementing a scientific formula which won't change).

A good compromise might be to put the equation in the comments in symbol-heavy form, and use the spelled out names in code.