alt Hacker NewsHot take, but I've always felt the world would be better served if mathematicians and physicists would stop using terrible short variable names and use longCamelCaseDescriptiveNames like the rest of us, because paper is cheap, and abbreviations are confusing. I know it's nicer when you're writing by hand, but when you clean up a proof or formula for publishing, would it really be so hard to switch to descriptive names?
I'm a practitioner of neither though, so I can't condemn the practice wholeheartedly as an outsider, but it does make me groan.
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Long names are good for short expressions, but they obfuscate complex ones because the identifiers visually crowd out the operators.
This can be especially difficult if the author is trying to map 1:1 to a complex algorithm in a white paper that uses domain-standard mathematical notation.
The alternative is to break the "full formula" into simpler expression chunks, but then naming those partial expression results descriptively can be even more challenging.
Better served to students and those unfamiliar with the field, but noisy to those familiar. Considering that much of mathematical work is done using pen/paper, it would be a total pain to write out huge variable names every time.
Consider a simple programming example, in C blocks are delimited by `{}`, why not use `block_begin` and `block_end`? Because it's noisy, and it doesn't take much to internalize the meaning of braces.