== Quote from Christopher Wright ([email protected])'s article > Kagamin wrote: > > Daniel Keep Wrote: > > > >>> You probably don't want D, you want ATS: > >>> http://www.ats-lang.org/ > >>> > >>> Bye, > >>> bearophile > >> http://www.ats-lang.org/EXAMPLE/MISC/listquicksort.dats > >> > >> Dear god. I think... I think I'm going to go cry in the corner... > > > > Is it common for functional languages to love 1-letter identifiers, I > > wonder? > Probably. Mathematicians use "ab" to mean "a multiplied by b", so they > tend toward single-character identifiers with subscripts. And functional > languages seem to cater more toward mathematicians. > I tend to find most examples of the remarkable efficiency of functional > languages entirely unreadable, partly because of this, and partly > because they seem fond of using many operators, some in ways that I find > bizarre.
<Rant> True. Conversely, whenever I read something mathy, it always drives me crazy how hard it is to read something expressed in math notation that is actually quite intuitive to express in code in a sane language like D (or Python, etc). If mathematicians applied their unreadable "style" to mainstream code, they'd be shot because people would believe they were obfuscating it on purpose. Single letter variable names drive me crazy because when I read equations I constantly lose track of what the variables represent. Worse yet, when mathematicians run out of good variable names, they use Greek letters that look almost the same as English letters, just to make it easier to confuse variable names. When I do math myself, my programming side kicks in and I often find myself trying to name variables descriptively like I would if coding, rather than using one letter like a mathematician. Similarly, I find linear algebra impossible to grok largely because some genius mathematician decided to overload a bunch of operators to mean completely different things when dealing with matrices than when dealing with scalars. Heck, the multiplication operator isn't even commutative. Frankly, yes, programming/comp sci may arguably be a branch of mathematics, but if it is, programmers have invented better notation than mathematicians. The mathematicians should stay the heck out of all programming notation discussions. </Rant>
