this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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I recently held a science slam about this topic! It's a mix of the first computer scientists being mathematicians, who love their abbreviations, and limited screen size, memory and file size. It's a trend in computing that has been well justified in the past, but has been making it harder for people to work together. And the need to use abbreviations has completely gone with the age of auto completion and language servers.
Man, I hate that so much. I swear this was half the reason I struggled with maths and physics, that these guys need to write this:
Rather than this:
At some point, they even collectively decided that not having to write a multiplication dot is more important than being able to use more than a single letter for your variables. Just what the fuck?
Using full names like that might be fine for explaining a physical rule, or stating the final result of some calculation - but it certainly would be cumbersome and difficult for actually carrying out the calculations. In many cases we already fill pages with algebra showing how things can be related and rearranged to arrive at new results. That kind of work would be intractable with full word names for the variables, partially because you'd be constantly spilling off the end of the page trying to write the steps; but also because having all that stuff would actually obfuscate what you are trying to do - which is algebra. And during that process, the meanings and values of the pronumerals is not as important has how they interact with each other. So the names are just a distraction.
For setting up an equation, and for stating the final result, the meanings of the variables are very important; but during the process of manipulating the equations to get the result you want the meanings of the letters are often ignored. You only need to know that it is something that can be multiplied, or inverted, or subtracted, or whatever. Eg. suppose I want to rearrange to get the velocity. I don't care that I'm dividing both sides by the air density times the drag coefficient and the area... I'm just dividing ρCA, which is an algebraic blob whose interpretation can be saved for some other time.
This is absolutely true, but it still seems to me that we're throwing the baby out with the bath water when we just stick to extremely terse symbols for everything regardless of context.
Reading articles would be so much easier if they used even slightly longer names – thankfully more and more computer science articles do tend to use more human readable naming nowadays, at least.
Sure, longer names make manipulation harder a bit more annoying if you're doing it by hand, but if you do need to manipulate something you can then abbreviate the terms (and I'm 60% sure I've seen some papers that had both a longer form and a shorter form for terms, so one for explaining shit and one for the fiddly formal stuff)
Of course using terse terms is totally fine when it's clear from the context what eg. ∆x means.