91–100 of 191 posts
> Adopting standard notations across the field could offer huge benefits They skipped the related xkcd. https://xkcd.com/927/
wow, you got downvoted pretty hard & fast. tried to help coutneract because while that joke is played out - there's a reason that joke is played out.
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Notation is a tool for thought. You want to optimize it for the problem you're solving. Not that PL notation is optimal, but being beginner-friendly is about the last thing one should care about.
Except in a programming language designed for learning programming. Ideally, we would have a good educational language with a clear path mapping the notation from that language to more common notation used in programming languages designed for computer science, software engineering, or software development.
There's like 50 years of notational history, and it can be wildly inconsistent. Some things are somewhat standardized, but there's no central location to look this stuff up. Probably one of the better resources is Benjamin Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages" (often referred to simply as TAPL), but I've seen even recent papers deviate from TAPL's treatment.
So when new people are trying to break into the PL research sphere, there's a huge barrier to entry. Invariably, they'll need to ask other researchers to decipher some of the notation in whatever papers they read because the authors just assumed the notation was prevalent enough to not warrant explanation. This works fine for people privileged enough to already be working in PL research as undergrads, but it's much tougher if you're coming from a different background. The PL research community is fairly active on Twitter, but explanations of decades-old notation do not conform to 280-character text messages very well.
It's a big issue that a lot of us younger PL researchers talk about often. I ask myself: how did I learn this stuff? Many meetings with my first PI as I had to bring up symbol after symbol from whatever papers I was trying to read. I took a graduate course in PL semantics which also helped, but then I've also seen deviations from that notation, so...??? And there's still notation I'm unfamiliar with. I was reading about substructural type systems recently (which are super cool, by the by) and encountered some symbols I didn't know and my current PI didn't know and none of my lab mates knew, so I resorted to a PL Discord server where some grad student at another university across the country was able to chime in with the answer. Such a headache.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Notation is a tool for thought. You want to optimize it for the problem you're solving. Not that PL notation is optimal, but being beginner-friendly is about the last thing one should care about.
> but being beginner-friendly is about the last thing one should care about. Why is that? If our ideas are good, don't we want the most number of people to know them? What if PL research isn't getting the population of people and ideas it desires? Look to organizations that have been around longer with even more inscrutable forms of knowledge, how well do they age and evolve? I think there is a lot more at play here…
In this I agree with Paul Graham (and note I don't worship the guy). When talking about some lisps, he wrote [1]: > As names, car and cdr are great: short, and just the right visual distance apart. The only argument against them is that they're not mnemonic. But (a) more mnemonic names tend to be over-specific (not all cdrs are tails), and (b) after a week of using Lisp, car and cdr mean the two halves of a cons cell…
Look at Perl for an example of what happened to a language with syntax that appealed only to people who were already Perl-practitioners.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Notation is a tool for thought. You want to optimize it for the problem you're solving. Not that PL notation is optimal, but being beginner-friendly is about the last thing one should care about.
> but being beginner-friendly is about the last thing one should care about. Why is that? If our ideas are good, don't we want the most number of people to know them? What if PL research isn't getting the population of people and ideas it desires? Look to organizations that have been around longer with even more inscrutable forms of knowledge, how well do they age and evolve? I think there is a lot more at play here…
Do you think the tools for broad communication and peer practitioner communication could be very different because they have different aims? Spreading findings in cutting-edge research as broadly as possible is perhaps in some cases not the primary goal.
That is not to say we should in any way that we should gatekeep knowledge! That is unconscionable. It's just that perhaps Watson and Crick's paper on x-ray crystallography of DNA is perhaps not the ideal time to stop and explain what electromagnetism is so that a reader can understand what an x-ray is.
Ironic that this uses "PL notation" in its title - an ungoogleable acronym (luckily Hacker News has clarified this as meaning programming language notation).
In this I agree with Paul Graham (and note I don't worship the guy). When talking about some lisps, he wrote [1]: > As names, car and cdr are great: short, and just the right visual distance apart. The only argument against them is that they're not mnemonic. But (a) more mnemonic names tend to be over-specific (not all cdrs are tails), and (b) after a week of using Lisp, car and cdr mean the two halves of a cons cell…
Everyone is a beginner before they become a practitioner. Look at Perl for an example of what happened to a language with syntax that appealed only to people who were already Perl-practitioners.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone is a beginner before they become a practitioner. Look at Perl for an example of what happened to a language with syntax that appealed only to people who were already Perl-practitioners.
PG's point is that language syntax and notation should be aimed at practitioners. For beginners, almost anything will be a hurdle till the get the hang of it. Afterwards, they'll be practitioners. Being a beginner is a temporary situation; practitioners are forever.
Now, you are right that the syntax is for practitioners. But if it's too bizarre to non-practitioners, it is in fact a barrier to entry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone is a beginner before they become a practitioner. Look at Perl for an example of what happened to a language with syntax that appealed only to people who were already Perl-practitioners.
PG's point is that language syntax and notation should be aimed at practitioners. For beginners, almost anything will be a hurdle till the get the hang of it. Afterwards, they'll be practitioners. Being a beginner is a temporary situation; practitioners are forever.
Sure, being a beginner is a temporary situation, but let's not excuse absurdities and unnecessary convolutions as a result.
In this I agree with Paul Graham (and note I don't worship the guy). When talking about some lisps, he wrote [1]: > As names, car and cdr are great: short, and just the right visual distance apart. The only argument against them is that they're not mnemonic. But (a) more mnemonic names tend to be over-specific (not all cdrs are tails), and (b) after a week of using Lisp, car and cdr mean the two halves of a cons cell…
Everyone is a beginner before they become a practitioner. Look at Perl for an example of what happened to a language with syntax that appealed only to people who were already Perl-practitioners.
It became for several years one of the most successful and widely used scripting languages on Unix?