I recently held a science slam about this topic! It's a mix of the first computer scientists being mathematicians, who love their abbreviations, and limited screen size, memory and file size. It's a trend in computing that has been well justified in the past, but has been making it harder for people to work together. And the need to use abbreviations has completely gone with the age of auto completion and language servers.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 60 points 1 month ago (28 children)

mathematicians, who love their abbreviations

Man, I hate that so much. I swear this was half the reason I struggled with maths and physics, that these guys need to write this:

Rather than this:

At some point, they even collectively decided that not having to write a multiplication dot is more important than being able to use more than a single letter for your variables. Just what the fuck?

[–] trolololol@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Try to write the above with pen and ink and then tell me if you can read it back yourself.

Single letters is not a good system but it was the less bad one.

[–] lukstru@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Yep, that's what it usually boils down to. However, I think a slight approach shift for basic materials could be useful, where introductory books / papers / ... write out formulas. That makes it easier to understand the basic concepts before moving onto the more complex stuff. It should be easy to create such works, as they are usually created digitally, and autocomplete is available. Students can and will abbreviate those written outs words by themselves (after all, writing is annoying), but IMO reading comprehension is the key part that can be improved.

Also, when doing long formulas that you want to eliminate members of, writing stuff out can be a nightmare.

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