151–160 of 406 posts
I don't think medicine or law are the best examples to use here unless you think Sarbanes-Oxley or the anterior medial malleolar artery are well named.
I disagree. There are only few cases in which you can describe a mathematical concept with few meaningful words. Like this is the list of number types I could think of. If you don't know it, there is no benefit of knowing what it is called in English. Are rational numbers rational, and are imaginary numbers imaginary? Can the author come up with better name than this, I doubt so. Rational numbers Real numbers Imagina…
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I strongly agree that precision matters, but in no way does naming a concept after a person help with precision. Almost entirely orthogonal. What does help with precision is typed languages. You cannot use a term until you've precisely defined it in terms previously defined, which can be back-traced automatically by a computer to ones and zeroes. It must be a language both parseable by a human and a machine. At that…
Is this a joke? I really can’t tell
Hard disagree. 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 remembe…
One side feels the intended audience is of the same field and sufficiently sophisticated enough to understand the somewhat obscure naming. Others don’t understand it because it simply isn’t for them.
The other side may come from other tangential domains with their own unique language. They don’t understand why those specialists use such obscure language meanwhile they do the same in their own field.
You see the same in any large organization. Seemingly random acronyms get created as lazy shorthand that conflict with other orgs understanding. It’s of course no consequence to those in the “in crowd” but it hampers communication between groups. Considering communication is one of the ever present hurdles between groups it seems reasonable to me to optimize communication between groups rather than within groups.
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Computer science is not a subfield of math. Theoretical computer science is, but there is a lot more to cs than just tcs, for example: operating systems, programming languages, human computer interaction, etc. I agree on your first point though, I think the concepts named after people are usually so abstract that the hard part is to really understand the concepts, not to remember the name.
for example: operating systems, programming languages, human computer interaction, etc. Those topics might seem to have nothing to do with math but all of their components have mathematical underpinnings. Algorithms, data structures, complexity theory, and even the physics of end-to-end latency, colour perception, etc. There probably are some people out there, working in these fields with only a high school math back…
It is not. Applied Computer Science has as much common with math as Chemistry does with math.
I view theoretical computer science as mostly self-masturbatory, to the point that is very very divorced from real life applications and is benefiting very little to us.
Also the market has spoken as well. Someone with CS degree, and 5 years of experience can command a higher salary than someone that took 5 years to get his/her phd in CS. A phd degree is not seen as valuable, mostly because it is not seen as beneficial and it is very divorced to reality of applied computer engineering.
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I Disagree with you, in Computer Science we have things like: "Quick Sort", "Merge Sort", "Map", "Hashtable", "LRU", etc... etc... They are much more descriptive and easy to remember, even though the Algorithms can be complex themselves. Event the name "Boolean", could be changed to "Conditional"... and be even more readable. Also, Dijkstra algorithm can be generalized to "Shortest Path Algorithm" (there can be more…
Meanings of words drift over time, like, litterally.
Strongly Disagree! You name things after who discovered it. In these case you name it after mathematicians like Newton, Euler, Turing, Gödel. For me its some sort of ignorance if you do not honor the one who discovered it. Other sciences has it too named after persons Fahrenheit, Celsius, Pascal etc.
Were tables invented by Mr/Mrs Table? Bottles by Mr/Mrs Bottle?
But on the other hand, names are simply irrelevant. Anything is better than a name of a person, even if that person was brilliant. The person may be remembered as an aspect of some discovery (say, Einstein), but the concept as such should have some distinct name, not tainted by history, or mere human lifetimes. It should transcend existence as experienced by a human.