I'm not a computer scientist but as a programmer I enjoy dabbling in computer science papers and while I often do understand the underlying concepts (sometimes very well since I've been using these concepts daily for decades) I often find myself incapable of following a paper just because the notation is hopelessly obtuse.
The immediate example for me would be lambda calculus which makes a lot of sense to me when expressed in code (be it lisp, python or Rust) but just looks like vomit in theoretical papers, for instance:
(λy.M)[x := N] = λy.(M[x := N]), if x ≠ y and y ∉ FV(N)
This looks like a perl one liner from an obfuscation contest.
Why is it that software engineers in a few decades have come to the conclusion that proper variable naming is important and abuse of sigils a bad idea but mathematics don't feel the same way?
The immediate example for me would be lambda calculus which makes a lot of sense to me when expressed in code (be it lisp, python or Rust) but just looks like vomit in theoretical papers, for instance:
This looks like a perl one liner from an obfuscation contest.Why is it that software engineers in a few decades have come to the conclusion that proper variable naming is important and abuse of sigils a bad idea but mathematics don't feel the same way?