Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

Does it? No one does this:

  var STRAWBERRY_PI = 1 + Math.PI;

For example, no one doing math will use τ (2𝛑) and 𝛑 simultaneously. Choose one or the other, otherwise you are increasing the number of symbols someone has to learn to understand your math. Naming everything is overwhelming. Mathematics is about similarities, not differences. If the transformation is trivial, then don't bother creating a new symbol. It will just confuse you more.

View on HN

I don't agree at all. This happens all the time. For example, electrical engineering has f, ω, and s, all only differing by basic factors of 2π or i.

As far as I can tell, the main reason this gets done is to give commonly recurring quantities single symbols, to reduce errors in lengthy calculations. When those recurring quantities are meaningfully different, in ways that help prime one's intuition, that's all the more reason to do it.

You also save clock cycles by avoiding the extra calculation each time you compute 2pi or whatever by defining TWO_PI once. So it was lot more common in Fortran and C programming days.

As an electrical engineer you'll typical use f, ω, and s, in different contexts and you'll learn each of those contexts separately.

f: consumer electronics ω: circuits s: frequency response

Having multiples of terms for each is definitely a hindrance to education. It makes switching between each use a mental headache.

> As an electrical engineer you'll typical use f, ω, and s, in different contexts and you'll learn each of those contexts separately.

Perhaps it's just my unconventional education (see username), but when I'm doing something like filter design, I really do end up using all of those at once. I'll do the on-paper design portions with s, the computational section of the design with ω, and then when I build the thing to test it, the scope or spectrum analyzer read out in f (if I'm lucky). So they're genuinely all there at once!

tons of libraries define both PI and TWO_PI

Reply on news.ycombinator.com