[almostgotcaught]

Academic CS, moreso than any of the other STEM subjects, is like that whose line is it anyway meme - all the words are completely made up and absolutely none of the results matter.

So a vector isn't a vector, a tensor isn't a tensor, einsum isn't actually Einstein summation, automatic differentiation often gives derivatives for things that aren't differentiable, a neural network has nothing to do with neurons, etc etc etc

CS people think it's a crime that humanities people make up words in order to publish but they're really living in an extremely glassy glass house.

[mjburgess]

Yes, I think it comes from the kind of metaphorical language that writing programs induces. If artists "kinda lie" when describing how their art represents some emotion or reality, likewise, computer scientists are also engaged in this 'metaphorical representation' game -- unlike the science, which aim to actually represent, not metaphorically.

This also drives me mad reading many a computer science paper now -- the disrespect for the ordinary meaning of words is only so obscene in the most radical kinds of poetry. This feels wholly out of place in anything called a 'science', and leads to endless amounts of confusion.

There are none in all of academia so brazen in a poetic use of language and at the same time so incurious as to its meaning.

[nyrikki]

Vec4 is a vector, but yes C++ base vec is not.

In some ways CS is more correct with the modern (abstract) algebra definition of a vector, vs the historical didactics arrow concept.

Tensor has been abused, it is a property of bilinear maps, and as matrix multiplication is a bilinear operation there is a concept overlap there.

Vectors are really just elements of a vector space, not necessarily arrows.