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Yep; check out how the programming community does it! We have descriptive names for things like "Apache", "React", "nginx", "Rust", and "Java"!
Not sure how feasible or necessary this is in general, but there are certainly some places for improvement. Some more modern examples than "isosceles": - Heaviside function → step function (edit: though maybe this one is, amusingly, already descriptive by accident?) - Fourier domain → frequency domain While I'm here, just a couple suggestions from me: - Markov chain → memoryless chain - Lebesgue integral → horizontal…
Though that example brings up a decent counterargument to the thesis: ”groups”, ”rings” and ”fields” all have descriptive names, but that doesn’t help a bit, they’re still mad confusing. They’d almost be easier to pick apart if they were named after people.
Some profiling would show that names increase the difficulty of math by 0.001%. I don’t see an issue here.
Do you have a suggestion for how you would make a measurement like that? It seems like the experimental procedure would require definitions at least several layers deep, the control based on real names and experimental group based another metric. Maybe the experimental groups names would be more closely tied to the structure of the math they were naming though that seems challenging.
Once you get to the advanced levels of any field, terminology being "accessible" doesn't really matter, but being precise does.
Areas like philosophy and law actually suffer in my opinion when they overload common words with uncommon meanings, or descend into weird disambiguations that depend on suffixes.
For example, in philosophy there's "contractarianism" and "contractualism", and trying to remember which is the general term and which refers to a specific theory drives me nuts. (If "contractualism" were just known as "Scanlon's theory" it would be a lot easier.)
Naming things after their creator is actually super-helpful because it's really easy to disambiguate, helps situate things historically, and once you're at that level there often isn't a single unique word or phrase that can easily encapsulate the idea anyways and isn't easily confused with something else.
Rational numbers
Real numbers
Imaginary numbers
Complex numbers(including imaginary numbers)
Hypercomplex numbers
Hyper real numbers
Surreal numbersThere's an equally annoying problem in software engineering at large corporations (aka Google), where hundreds of services you need to know about are named with some cute name that gives you no idea what the thing actually is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ [this is a link comedy video about microservice architectures, it should be safe for work except maybe for Uber employees]
This is how I feel every day in my new job, there are 3 (depreciated) ways to do everything, and the current way is never feature-complete.
Conway just referred to it as a monster while corresponding with Fischer and the name stuck.
We all know what this article is really about. It is disappointing to see these kinds of articles on hn. (posted multiple times as well) ref: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust, Go, C, D, R, Flask, Rocket.
Append programming language to the query for searching. Imagine C++ would be named as "Object oriented, generic, general purpose programming language with C compatibility"(of course C won't be named C then).