I mean you've just translated from a language most people don't speak to a different language most people don't speak
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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A simpler language many people know (math) to one of the imfinite dialect of a language most people don't speak.
Left representation is definitely more readable and understanded by more people
Left representation is definitely more readable
Hard disagree. The right can be read linearly. You know, the way humans read.
I sucked balls at precalc, but I'm pretty decent at programming. I suppose, with enough practice, one becomes "fluent" in mathematical notation, but the C-style language definitely reads more naturally. The mathematical notation is what I'd call "too much abstraction."
and understanded by more people
I don't know the stats, but I have to imagine, by this point, there are more programmers than mathematicians.
Maybe it's the order that you learn it in. For me the left side is the easy to read and understand one.
Part of what's going on here is that math notation is ... not good. Not for understanding, readability or explanation. Add in the prestige that surrounds being "good at math" and "being able to read that stuff?" and you get an unhealthy amount of gate keeping.
Whenever I've been able to find someone breakdown a set of equations into computer code has been a wonderful clarifying experience. And I think it goes beyond just being better at code or something. Computer code, more often, is less forgiving about what exactly is going on in the system. Maths, IME, often leaves some ambiguity or makes some presumption in the style of "oh, of course you'd need to do that". While if you going to write a program, it all needs to be there, explicitly.
I recommend Brett Victor's stuff on this: Kill Math
It's funny, with the increase in use of numerical models, so much math has been turned into computer code. Derivatives and integrals as well are defined by finite difference formulas that serve as the basis for the notations. The point of them isn't to explain, it's just to simplify writing and reading it. I agree it can be a bit obtuse but if you had to write out a for loop to solve a math equation every time it would take forever lol
A maths major could point out edges cases where the maths terminology works but the computer code break, but for broad-strokes purposes they’re the same.
Freya is awesome. Nearly everything I know about shader code I learned from her YouTube channel