• Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    I don’t know what to tell you. They obliterate readability for me.
    I also genuinely believe these shorthands hinder access to research for the 99.9% of humanity who are not experts in the given field. Obviously, you do need to understand the context to use a formula correctly, but that also becomes harder when everything is written with hieroglyphs.
    In university, I had to assess this paper. It took me 3 weeks to decipher that alien language, and it doesn’t even say anything particularly riveting.

    To address your points:

    • I’m hoping that at least published math can be typed out with full names.
    • I’m not opposed to local aliases. E.g. if the point is that some values in the matrix are negative and others not, then absolutely write “with air_resistance as ‘a’, the catapultation matrix is { a, -a, -a, … }”.
    • I don’t actually want to introduce spaces into variable names, that’s just an example I randomly found online. I was rather thinking e.g. sine(euler^velocity_b).
      Bonus point: You can reasonably type it on a computer, because you don’t need Greek letters and subscripts anymore.
    • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      Btw i am all for local aliases. I see them most of the times.

      i.e, [equation], where a = area of the surface, v= velocity,…

      But without short codes it would be a pain to write and remember. Some of the shortening like del operator really reallh simplifies the original expression with better showcase of physical meaning, but looks alien to people who don’t know. But we can’t stop using it since it makes everything else difficult for people in that area