Comment by valenterry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by valenterry | Hacker News Reader

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> It's about whether someone can read your program and completely understand it in one pass

That's not the only thing. It's also how fast they can read/understand the program code.

> All mathematicians are expected to write paragraphs in "English" or some other relevant language outside of equations.

Sure, we do that for software also - we document things outside of the code. For example in a wiki, a README.md or sometimes even just above the code as comment/docs. But that's not what I was talking about, right?

> Whenever a mathematician uses the letter "x" or "f" they define the meaning with an english phrase or paragraph.

So you are fine if a developer does e.g. `c := (some super complex expression) // find relevant customer` and then goes on to use just `c` everywhere in their code instead of `relevantCustomerBlaBlaBla`?

Also, mathematicians don't always do that. Sometimes they just say "let x be [insert complex equation]". See for yourself in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_geometry or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_surface

I'm sure your will find a lot of papers, books and articles where they do this.

>That's not the only thing. It's also how fast they can read/understand the program code.

What are you doing? Speed reading? Even 2xing the reading time with verbosity is not a factor if lack of verbosity forces the reader to switch context multiple times in order to elucidate meaning.

>Sure, we do that for software also - we document things outside of the code. For example in a wiki, a README.md or sometimes even just above the code as comment/docs. But that's not what I was talking about, right?

Major difference. In math it's required. In programming it's recommended and rarely done. When it is done, it's rarely done in a form that's as complete or as detailed as math. YOu get an outline at best. Programmers are expected to read code without documentation because program writers are too lazy to write documentation.

SO what I'm saying is put your documentation into the code itself. Self documenting code with readable names as opposed to elegant.

>So you are fine if a developer does e.g. `c := (some super complex expression) // find relevant customer` and then goes on to use just `c` everywhere in their code instead of `relevantCustomerBlaBlaBla`?

relevantCustomerMetric is way better than c everywhere. Autocomplete should alleviate the pain of typing. Not every programmer arrives at the variable where it was incepted so they can't see the comment.

>Also, mathematicians don't always do that. Sometimes they just say "let x be [insert complex equation]". See for yourself in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_geometry or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_surface

Isn't "let x be" english? What's the purpose of those words? Clarity.

> Isn't "let x be" english

How is `let x be ???` any different from `let x = ???`

"let" is still english. "let x =" is short for "let x equal"

Exactly - so why do you treat them different? Because programmers use "=" and mathematicians write "be"?

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