Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question

["Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 03:33:41AM +0200, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
>> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
> [...]
>
>> > you say
>> >
>> >     Γ ⊢ e : τ
>
> [...]
>
>> > Of course, if you're not familiar with the local conventions, it looks
>> > like line noise, but otherwise it offers people much higher concision,
>> > so they can focus on the important aspects.
>> 
>> Those conventions make sense when you work on the same field for long
>> enough periods (students, specialized programmers...) but I guess that
>> most of us deal with heterogeneous code on a regular basis [...]
>
>> As for the higher concision, it is acceptable for cases where the
>> "read-time"/"think-time" ratio is low [...]
>
> Excuse you both my selective quoting. But you're just confirming one fear
> I had all along: in our trade (hacking) it seems we spend far too much time
> coding and far too little time thinking!
>
> Mathematicians, who think more and tinker less, seem to have found a sweet
> spot in a far more compact notation.

Well, I think the difference is that programmers can deal (or at least,
try to deal) with multi-million-line programs, while mathematicians seem
to snob multi-million-line profs.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26753-mathematicians-anger-over-his-unread-500page-proof.html

On the other hand, some programs are not read and checked enough, as
several security bugs discovered recently showed.

But nonetheless, professionnally, programmers have to work on big code
bases, and find ways to do it, how imperfectly they may be.

It looks like mathematicians are less willing or able to do so.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
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