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4 later thoughts

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It's interesting how many notational shortcuts mathematicians take would never be tolerated by a programmer.

For example the confusion as to whether f(x) is referring to the function f over the independent variable x versus the value of f given a value x.

It can get even worse in discussing something like coordinate transformations where you might have

x(r(x, y), \theta(x, y)) \equiv x
where sometimes x is a function and sometimes it's an independent variable.

I'm just watching a wonderful lecture series by Pavel Grinfeld and he's (understandably) going to great lengths to clarify in each expression (including the equivalence above) whether something is a function or an independent variable. I suspect programmers get it much more quickly.

28 earlier thoughts