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by gms7777 1110 days ago
Usually, language that tries to simplify or put things in layman's terms is missing important detail for fully specifying the problem. It's like watching the 3 minute version of a recipe on YouTube and thinking you have a good understanding of how it works, but then when you go to make it, you realize they didn't tell you if they used whole-wheat or all-purpose flour, or if they bake at 350 or 450, or in a glass or aluminum pan. If you try to follow the recipe, you might end up with something significantly different. It's not that the quick, intuitive version isn't useful, you can gain a lot of insight and get a high level picture often much quicker than you would reading the complete, fully specified recipe. But if what you want to do is reproduce the recipe exactly, you need the fully specified version. Personally when I'm writing technical documents, I prefer to include both the intuitive overview and the fully specified technical version.