Invited Talk - Guy Steele

The context here isn't the average American, but a high school student taking an AP test involving writing math -- where scoring well counts for the same credit as having passed the equivalent entry level course(s) in college. Besides, math is already pseudo language on top of pseudo language. Learning notation is part of math, I'll concede learning to type an expression on a computer is a different notation than writing it with pen, but if you can't learn that, why learn math? Each domain does its own thing too and isn't even necessarily consistent. Guy Steele gave a great talk a few years ago on "Computer Science Metanotation", and that's just one area of math: [this video] (Edit: And to conclude here, learning to read and write with some notation tends to be easy, it's learning what the math actually means that is the hard part.)

You beat me to it. > The most popular programming language in computer science has no compiler, interpreter, or complete specification. It is remarkably concise. It grew over decades; today, dozens of variations are in use. Its complexity has reached the point where it needs to be re-explained every time it is used—but too often it is not; instead, each variant is more or less taken for granted. This has led to ambiguities and inconsistencies. Much effort has been spent in hand-translating, in both directions, between this language and other languages that do have compilers, primarily for the purpose of implementing yet other languages. => [link] Guy Steele => [link] "A Cobbler's Child" talk at Code Mesh 2017 => [link] "A Cobbler's Child" (video on youtube) => [this video] "It's Time for a New Old Language" (video on youtube) => [link] Discussion on HN => [link] Slides To me this seems like a pretty sorry state of affairs. The folks trying the hardest to speak precisely about the most precise human art use ambiguous and inconsistent notation. wat?