> mathematical notation has changed over the years.
I agree. Math notation has changed in response to problems mathematicians have faced, and as their thinking have evolved. It should not change because tool builders for mathematicians - when the tool builders in most cases are not even professional mathematicians - decide some other notation is better.
> array.mean().round(digits=2)
might be good (it is not) when you are operating on one object. As soon as you have a binary operation (say multiplication), this notation completely breaks down. Because the operation is often symmetric, or "near" symmetric, meaning it is not so different as to write something as ridiculous as x.product(y).
But more importantly, (common/dominant) mathematics is functional in nature. It's decidedly not object oriented. Given a matrix, M, doing something like M.eigenvalues() is vomit-inducing because eigenvalues is not a property of a matrix M. For matrices, its a map from a set of linear transformations (of which M is merely one item) onto a set of numbers. It is its own thing, separate from M.
I agree. Math notation has changed in response to problems mathematicians have faced, and as their thinking have evolved. It should not change because tool builders for mathematicians - when the tool builders in most cases are not even professional mathematicians - decide some other notation is better.
> array.mean().round(digits=2)
might be good (it is not) when you are operating on one object. As soon as you have a binary operation (say multiplication), this notation completely breaks down. Because the operation is often symmetric, or "near" symmetric, meaning it is not so different as to write something as ridiculous as x.product(y).
But more importantly, (common/dominant) mathematics is functional in nature. It's decidedly not object oriented. Given a matrix, M, doing something like M.eigenvalues() is vomit-inducing because eigenvalues is not a property of a matrix M. For matrices, its a map from a set of linear transformations (of which M is merely one item) onto a set of numbers. It is its own thing, separate from M.