Your translation only makes intuitive sense to you because you are well versed in programming.

I suspect if I showed a non-technical person with no background in either math or programming they would think both are nonsense until you explained it to them

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rstuart4133 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I suspect if I showed a non-technical person with no background in either math or programming they would think both are nonsense until you explained it to them

I doubt it. Greek letters convey almost no information, whereas (one hopes) the function and variable names are chosen by a programmer to help the reader. The Greek letters used by mathematicians (and physicists) weren't used to convey information, they were used because typesetting, publishing and paper were expensive. They are optimised for brevity over readability.

It was a perfectly reasonable trade-off at the time, but times have changed.

As an aside, some programming languages (such as APL, and to a lesser extent Perl) did emulate the old Greek letter style. "Line noise" is a typical description of the result. No computer language aimed at software engineers and computer scientists does that now.

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WarmWash 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The thing is that you basically cannot explain the math like you can the programming.

Tables, algos, and variables are all things people can generally quickly grasp. The construction is abstract but the function is tangible.

The math is working entirely on abstract objects, using abstract tools, governed by abstract rules. It's just all so desperately far away from anything even technical people have contact with.

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umvi 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My example was contrived, I'm sure some smart people could come up with a SQL-esque language that is even more readable to non-technical folks than programming syntax. At a certain point though, your layman has to know the "atomic" (as in, you can't break them down further) mathematical concepts like "functions" and "infinity":

`sum function(x) from x=0 to x=infinity`

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BlackFingolfin 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am a research mathematician. In my field (abstract algebra, computational group theory), a sum or some such notation is like the most trivial of trivial things in terms of notation. There are a few things like sums that could in theory be made to "look more like what a computer programmer would expect", but that'd be just a tiny corner of it.

And if you think about how summation would look in Lisp or APL (which some smart people use to this day), I am not even convinced your argument for the "sum function" notation being superior holds in general.

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xyzzyz 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sure some smart people could come up with a SQL-esque language that is even more readable to non-technical folks than programming syntax.

And somehow, none of the thousands of very smart mathematicians have done that, or if they had, it has not seen wide adoption. I recommend contemplating on this: if math could be made easier by changing notation, why hasn't this already happened?

	▲	umvi 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Momentum, mainly. Richard Feynman invented a more intuitive triangle-based syntax for sin/cos/tan/etc but eventually abandoned it and conformed with mathematical norms for the sake of ubiquity.