<story><title>Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)</title><url>http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20is--.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moultano</author><text>Seriously! Any programmer would get pilloried for working solely in single letter variable names. It&amp;#x27;s so tedious that this is the norm in math.</text></item><item><author>mrfusion</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love if all the formulas on Wikipedia were written as pseudo code with meaningful variable names.  I&amp;#x27;d understand them so much faster.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vlasev</author><text>The purpose is completely different! Here&amp;#x27;s one of several important reasons.&lt;p&gt;You wouldn&amp;#x27;t survive doing math with longer variable names. Imagine yourself writing &amp;quot;time&amp;quot; every time you need to write it in a formula in the course of a working on a problem. Just expand the following expression (time + 2)(2time - 3)(4time + 5) by hand, writing &amp;quot;time&amp;quot; every time. Or imagine studying vector calculus and writing out the formulas with the long names like &amp;quot;grad&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;curl&amp;quot;, etc. That kind of notation was replaces with the nabla symbol and overloaded notation for a very good reason.&lt;p&gt;Also, most derivations, for simple formulas even, go through larger complexities before they converge to something slick. Take a look at the derivation of the Navier-Stokes equations [1] and see if you could have done the same thing with longer variable, function and operator names.&lt;p&gt;So yea, it all boils down to repetition and quantity.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Derivation_of_the_Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Derivation_of_the_Navier%E2%80...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas (1967)</title><url>http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20is--.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moultano</author><text>Seriously! Any programmer would get pilloried for working solely in single letter variable names. It&amp;#x27;s so tedious that this is the norm in math.</text></item><item><author>mrfusion</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love if all the formulas on Wikipedia were written as pseudo code with meaningful variable names.  I&amp;#x27;d understand them so much faster.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bitwize</author><text>And then they run out of Latin letters so they switch to Greek. Then they run out of Greek letters so they switch to Hebrew...&lt;p&gt;You have to remember that math is written for the sake of mathematicians&amp;#x27; brains, not for the sake of dumb machines which accept only linear strings of a limited character set through a teletype. A mathematician can look at a formula and subconsciously break it down into constituent parts based on its &lt;i&gt;shape&lt;/i&gt;. Multi-letter (word? phrase?) variable names would only serve to add unnecessary clutter and obscure the shape of the formula. Meaningfulness of names is a secondary concern, if it is a concern at all; meaning can be established in the text surrounding the formulas or equations; and if things indeed get too complex for a set of a few formulas, the option is always there to switch representations -- to computer code or pseudocode.</text></comment>