/prog/ - Mathematics is shit

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:19

Just look at these ugly swatches of code:
http://www.cse.unt.edu/~idl99/Proceedings/ahn/img50.gif
http://www.cse.unt.edu/~idl99/Proceedings/ahn/node8.html

That is what you get, when programming immitates math. Even Java and PHP looks beautiful compared to that. Mathematics should be banned as a harmful and obfuscated teaching.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:21

Pattern matching in Erlang is sexy

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:23

>>1
classified subexpressions according to the informal usage relation to the accumulation parameter and results of recursions.
Even the text sounds like some pseudoscience, abusing vague buzzwords.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:30

I can't tell if I'm horrified or I love it.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:43

treat it as a natural language filled with symbols. It's something that is meant to communicate to people rather than machines, but it is also supposed to be definitive, unambiguous, and easy to manipulate symbolically.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:05

>>5
treat it as a natural language filled with symbols
There is no fucking language, it's an impenetrable stream of symbols whiсh blur into a single opaque black square, when you state at them for enough time.

It's something that is meant to communicate to people rather than machines
Doubt anyone, except author, could read this condensed pile of hebrew symbols.

but it is also supposed to be definitive, unambiguous, and easy to manipulate symbolically.
Why wont they use Lisp instead of math? Lisp is definitive, unambiguous and pretty easy to manipulate.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:09

Your problem isn't with math, but with its colloquial syntax, or more generally with natural language.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:17

>>7
Your problem isn't with math, but with its colloquial syntax
Sorry, but to learn math, you've to learn it's syntax first, which is where most students completely abandond science in favour of easier subjects (like liberal arts).

more generally with natural language.
Doubt anyone understands natural language in every case, because any natural sentence could be interpreted in several ways.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:29

>>6
I could say the same thing about chinese characters, but that is only because I have not yet learned chinese. If I learned chinese, I'm sure I could read it as easily as anyone else.

>>8
You are missing his point. Your problem isn't with math itself, but with not taking the time to understand what the symbols mean. I'd have the same problem with chinese above. My inability to understand chinese writing isn't due to anything specific about chinese, but due to my lack of understanding of what the symbols mean and how the grammar works. It is an encoding that people use to communicate ideas to each other. Once you understand the encoding, you can read and construct in your mind the ideas they may be trying to communicate.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:37

>>9
If I learned chinese, I'm sure I could read it as easily as anyone else.
How do you know? How do we know? How do they know?

only because I have not yet learned chinese.
Learning chinese would take years of practice, while living in China. You can learn Chinese and it's usage using dead textbook.

You are missing his point. Your problem isn't with math itself, but with not taking the time to understand what the symbols mean.
I can learn Lisp by reading the first chapters of SICP. Doubt there is an quick article which will teach you how to translate http://www.cse.unt.edu/~idl99/Proceedings/ahn/img50.gif into plain english.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:38

>>10
You cant fully learn Chinese and it's usage using dead textbook.
self fix

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:40

>>9
In order to understand what the symbols mean you have to have the meaning first.

Words and symbols are abstract, irrelevant objects. It's useless to create a pointer to something if you can't create that concept in your language. What was it in SICP? You can't make arrays of arrays in Basic or Fortran or something because they aren't closed?

That's the ultimate problem: A symbol is MEANINGLESS without MEANING.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:41

>>10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols

Godspeed.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:44

>>13
What's kind of sick is because the image is about static analysis of expressions something, you could use the paper itself as the mathematical model for divising a program to translate it to english.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:45

>>13
How do you use them?

>>12
You have to parse them first. Parsing even a simple infix expression is very hard: there are binding powers, parens, precedencies, left-to-right, bottom and top-down orders, missing operand, unary/binary ambiguities (`-` is used as both binary and unary op).

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:45

>>10

Well it is readable to some people. The symbols either get their meaning from the some kind of standard usage, or they need to be defined by the author at some point in the text. Certain symbols get used for different things for convenience, so you have to look it up.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:47

>>14
Strongly doubt, a laymen will understand loaded pseudoscientific sentences in a style of "classified subexpressions according to the informal usage relation to the accumulation parameter and results of recursions."

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:48

>>15

It is meant to read by a human, not a computer.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:48

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:49

>>15
Except the symbols and orders are irrelevant without explanation as to what the symbols are. You could do symbolic logic, you would even set up truth tables like 5+5=10 and come out with incredible proofs as to why they should be used that way, but ultimately, they're meaningless without putting them to something. I can say 6+6 = 14, 6+6 = 12, 6+6 = C. I tell you these statements are all true, and very simple ones at that. They don't differ in symbolics, except more or less on the truth table. I could use any symbols I want. Similarly, I could come up with any order for operations I want. Denominators over numerators? Why not. Negative exponential systems? Sure. The difference is in how those numbers are applied. That is mathematics, not conjuring up cryptic analyses and methodologies and purporting them as "self evident" truths.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:51

>>16
Well it is readable to some people.
By very limited circle of people, who have enough time, courage and will to learn all that mathematics shit.

The symbols either get their meaning from the some kind of standard usage
That is irrelevant. The point is: symbols look scary and hard to read.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:55

>>21

The alphabet is scary and hard to read for people who don't know how to read yet. That doesn't mean it'll stay that way after they learn how to read.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:55

http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmset.html#trivia

Somewhat irrelevant, but a pretty good example of Symbol Hell.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:58

>>21
anyways, math wasn't always done symbolically. I heard about a some historical middle eastern mathematicians that used long complete sentences to describe formula, and algebraic manipulation. But if you read one of their sentences, you'd understand the need for symbols.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:59

>>22
A good alphabet maps onto sounds. You then can translate words back and forth by translating sounds to letters. Not so with Chinese (it's letters have no sounds and there are thousands of them).

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:00

>>22
Not sure about your language, but there's only what, 7 parts of speech in english? On top of that, modifiers always get evaluated left->right until part of speech is reached (we don't see dogs red, but I will concede we do see shit like hastily running/running hastily). On top of that, the letters don't modify the behavior of the order of processing - this is an incredible difference (excluding that math is numerical processing).

You even have to admit, many, many people in the world prefer english because although it's a shitty, obtuse language, it's better than theirs. (50000 pictographs? Honorifics? Gendered nouns? Horrible mouthgore of pronounciations?)

Even better, we teach people to abstract words. We don't teach people how to abstract numerical relationships, we just says "parentheses go here or there or whatever" (only in a book from ~1947 did I read the term "algebraic expression")

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:03

anyways, the paper looks interesting. Thanks for the link. I've been meaning to keep up with stuff like this. If I find out what it is about, I'll bump the thread I guess.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:04

>>23
>begin reading
>first introduction
>infix operators
[u][b]PIG DISGUSTING[/u][/b]

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:10

>>28
What the fuck? You come here and shit up our board with your shitty imageboard quotes and erroneous BBCode?

I don't even need to say it but I will anyway.

/polecat kebabs/

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:11

>>29
Well I thought I read something where FILO didn't work

Maybe I screwed up the order

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:13

looks like
PIG DISGUSTING
[u]PIG DISGUSTING[/u]

Name: >>31 2012-01-09 3:15

wow, shii chan is weird. I suppose it had the choice of matching the bold or the underline, and it choose the bold.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:16

>>30
Come back in a year when you've mastered THE ART OF ^B_B^C_O^D_E

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:17

PIG DISGUSTING
[u][b]PIG DISGUSTING[/u][/b]
oh nevermind, that's a fifo fail

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:18

>>34
Actually, nevermind. Just go to /b/ and never come back.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:29

>>35
>implying that's me
If we just had (bold (underline (indent 'text))) then we wouldn't have to worry about this NOW WOULD WE

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:33

>>36
Do you mean italicize? Shit takes like 5 seconds to implement, bro.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:39

>>37
Yes, yes I did.

But I would like lisp-like bbcode, it'd be easier for me to remember.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 3:47

just compile some functions and funnel your input through there.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 4:24

>>39
compile axiom of infinity

Mathematics is shit

1 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:19

2 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:21

3 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:23

4 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:30

5 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:43

6 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:05

7 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:09

8 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:17

9 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:29

10 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:37

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12 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:40

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24 Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 2:58

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Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:19

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Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:23

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:30

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 1:43

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Name: >>31 2012-01-09 3:15

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Name: Anonymous 2012-01-09 4:24