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I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
161–170 of 281 posts
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#162I've also forgotten basically all high level math from school. And have to re-learn when the occasion comes to use some of it. But one thing that occurred to me is that in school I just learned how to make the calculations, so I never got a deep understanding on how things worked anyway. And that's fine.
That's fine if you don't mind the time that could have been spent on something you actually cared about.
Sometimes it happened that school attempted to teach me something I was interested in and I ended up understanding it. At other times, however, it all went to /dev/null.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started taking readability very seriously once I started going back to extend old code and finding I couldn't immediately understand what it was doing. Now, if I have that problem, it's now two problems. The original problem, and the readability problem. The readability problem is solved first, and the original problem can only be solved afterward. I don't see comments helping me, I could spend the time better by m…
> I don't see comments helping me... I don't know why people say this type of thing, as if there's some choice you have to make between good names and comments. You can have both, and there are absolutely times when comments are necessary . Too many comments may be a "smell", but code that doesn't require any comments at all is very unlikely.
The problem is the bug catch creep growing around DataInput and mathematical operations.
I think it would really help to have a language, that differs between the original methods raw body (displaying the pure intentions) and blends out the various filters and catchy expeption handling.
Such a function with catchy names, could be allmost as good as a coment- and is usually there. Coments can be useless too /* Function taking these arguments, returning this type */
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, teaching the basics of an abstract concept without first explaining how it fits into the bigger picture is IMO not the best way to motivate some people. I'm also a person who wants to understand why it's important instead of just trusting someone that it'll be useful "later". It'd be cool if, once you start your major, there was basically an overview class explaining why each of your courses is important and wh…
I took an automata class where the professor talked into the chalkboard and refused to explain why we were required to learn any of the material. It wasn't until later in the compilers course that we had a teacher who actually took the time to explain how all that mysterious theory actually had a place in the real world. So many light bulbs went off in my head during that class.
I had a similar experience from a different perspective -- I took a course on Theory of Computing, which was 50/50 gate-level CPU design and mathematical work on computability, automata and so on. I found this interesting as an intellectual exercise and to get a grasp on what is computable and what isn't, but then the next semester it proved super useful in the compiler design course.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#165I've also forgotten basically all high level math from school. And have to re-learn when the occasion comes to use some of it. But one thing that occurred to me is that in school I just learned how to make the calculations, so I never got a deep understanding on how things worked anyway. And that's fine.
That's fine if you don't mind the time that could have been spent on something you actually cared about. Sometimes it happened that school attempted to teach me something I was interested in and I ended up understanding it. At other times, however, it all went to /dev/null.
It's good that we forget stuff, or everyday tasks would be like querying from a fully saturated disk.
But we might have a tiny fraction of it in cpu cache, that will let use make heuristic decisions.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always felt that if I had done all of my calculus with Mathematica I would have left college with an excellent grasp on how to use higher level functions provided by Mathematica that would have largely abstracted away all of this. Of course, the higher level functions might get covered in cobwebs - but I suspect not the same way; I would have kept these higher level skills up to date because: - I recently went t…
Yeah, you should always, always code what you're thinking about, IMHO. I once turned in a take home differential geometry final in the form of an ipython notebook because I found computing curvature coefficients so tedious. Debugging the thing to pass all my unit tests (not to mention solving the test question) probably have me the best understanding of anyone in the class.
I had a similar experience - I learned symbolic differentiation largely because I happened to pick up a book on Prolog about the time we started covering it at school, and the book gave symbolic differentiation as an example. Not having a Prolog interpreter, I rewrote the thing in Pascal, and then wrote an expression parser for it. Debugging my Pascal translation really hammered home the rules for me at the time (and subsequently writing an expression parser for it was what got me interested in compilers).
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#167It seems to me that most commenters are ignoring the fact that the author is a guy that basically left high level mathematics after completing his phd.
So basically he went doing other stuff not functional-analysis-related and his functional-analysis got rusty.
It seems quite reasonable to me. Call it old code syndrome, call it "my math got rusty", it seems quite normal to me.
Also: according to http://fjmubeen.com/about/, the author got his phd in 2007. It's 2016.
Almost ten years. What... What are we talking about?
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#168TLDR: The author independently re-discovered what you may know as Old Code Syndrome. I think that's because mathematical papers place too much value on terseness and abstraction over exposition and intuition. This guy's basically in the position of a fairly new developer who's just been asked to do non-trivial update of his own code for the first time. All those clever one-liners he put into his code made him feel sm…
I am curious, how would you assess the readability of my code: http://github.com/EGreg/Platform I kind of developed that style organically as I went along, in both PHP and JS. I tried to make the output readable as well. I've seen many frameworks output a bunch of gibberish, but with today's bandwidth it's not such a big deal to add a little bit of whitespace and make everything readable. Here's a fairly complex appl…
There's a bunch of directories where you keep the PHP and JS files in the same directory, like this one: https://github.com/EGreg/Platform/tree/master/platform/plugi...
Any special rationale behind that approach?
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#169First, I am not sure Functional Analysis is as obscure as some other areas. But, second, this just shows, once again, that one ought never to use "clearly," "obviously" etc in proofs. It is the same principle as writing programs so they are easier for the next programmer to read. That person may be you.
I don't read maths papers, but in CS papers too, words like "clearly" and "obviously" etc. serve as red flags to me that screams "hand-waving or big gaps coming up".
Often it's understandable short-cuts, but often it also turns out that the author has left out very substantial chunks of knowledge, or sometimes clearly don't understand why they got the results they did.
In CS papers there's an additional red flag: Maths. Outside of a few maths heavy areas of CS where it is justified, if a CS paper is full of equations, it's a good sign they'll have glossed over a lot of essential information, such as parameters that often turns out to be essential to be able to replicate their results. Not always, but often enough for me to be vary.
I'm guessing it is because in the instances that include pseudo-code or working code, it is instantly obvious that something is missing, both to the author and to reviewers, but when it's obscured in equations it takes more effort to identify the same flaw because so many steps are often legitimately left out because of conventions that it's non-trivial for someone not steeped in the same notation to determine which bits should be defined and which bits are not necessary. I'm sure most of the time it's not intentional. But taking that shortcut seems to make it a lot easier to forget which additional information is actually necessary. And the irony is that I've seen plenty of example where the equations have taken up just as much space as pseudo-code or even working-but-naive implementations would have taken.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#170It seems to me that most commenters are ignoring the fact that the author is a guy that basically left high level mathematics after completing his phd. So basically he went doing other stuff not functional-analysis-related and his functional-analysis got rusty. It seems quite reasonable to me. Call it old code syndrome, call it "my math got rusty", it seems quite normal to me. Also: according to http://fjmubeen.com/a…
He actually finished the PhD in 2011, but started in 2007. Not sure whether that's a significant enough difference to change the point that you're making though.