Microsoft doesn’t know how to make/manage/deploy software at all. They are clueless to their own products and the problems THEY cause, and their information the public is ALWAYS outdated and a convoluted mess of bullshit…but it’s somehow out fault for not knowing
Yea… Microsoft has a history of doing this a lot… their “concession” to being a large software developer is that each version of an app seems to have an entirely different team that develops independently from the other platform versions (the best you can say is that they occasionally borrow good features from one another).
I recently got forcefully switched to “New Teams” at work which is a strict downgrade and doesn’t support half the shit the browser app (which, as a reminder, is a weird Frankenstein of calendar and email) supports. It also absolutely bombards users with unnecessary notifications that need to be individually muted.
Never have I appreciated Google more than when I was forced from GSuite to SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Visio, etc…
I remember liking it 10 years ago. Now, it’s not only way worse: it simply got surpassed by all the markdown note-taking apps (Joplin, Logseq, …) and xournalpp (or even rnote).
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.
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?
Bruh how large should our notebook pages be? Also how should we speak about the equation? What if the terms should be represented in a matrix? What if mathematical functions e^x, sin, ln etc. are present? Would you write sine of e^(velocity of the particle B) ? Notations are necessary for readability
Welcome to Greece! No, not our modern Greece, the old timey write philosophical questions into the dirt with sticks and argue with your best homies about it kind of Greece!
Want to compute something? Hope you got all your steps in linear order so you don’t have to remember too much in between other steps!
/s (but not really so I totally am on your side, original formulations of math problems are a pain…)
I don’t know what to tell you. They obliterate readability for me.
I also genuinely believe these shorthands hinder access to research for the 99.9% of humanity who are not experts in the given field. Obviously, you do need to understand the context to use a formula correctly, but that also becomes harder when everything is written with hieroglyphs.
In university, I had to assess this paper. It took me 3 weeks to decipher that alien language, and it doesn’t even say anything particularly riveting.
To address your points:
I’m hoping that at least published math can be typed out with full names.
I’m not opposed to local aliases. E.g. if the point is that some values in the matrix are negative and others not, then absolutely write “with air_resistance as ‘a’, the catapultation matrix is { a, -a, -a, … }”.
I don’t actually want to introduce spaces into variable names, that’s just an example I randomly found online. I was rather thinking e.g. sine(euler^velocity_b).
Bonus point: You can reasonably type it on a computer, because you don’t need Greek letters and subscripts anymore.
Thing is, you usually define all your variables. At least we do in engineering (of physical variety, rather than software).
Mostly because we can’t expect everyone reading the calculation to know, and that not everyone uses the same symbols.
Not explaining each variable is bad practice, other than for very simple things. (I do expect everyone and their dog reading a process eng calc to know PV=nRT, at a minimum).
Just like (in my opinion) not defining industry specific abbreviations is also bad practice.
Did you know that in the first version of php, each function name would be hashed to lookup the code to run it? And the hashing algorithm was: the first letter. So all the functions started with a different letter.
Fun fact not only to captchas monitor your input but also can analyze how you input it. If you mouse moves in a perfectly straight line if all your key presses are precisely spaced, you are probably not human.
Sure two additional cases not that bad, now just keep adding them up. Like anything security related it’s not 100% perfect you just have to make it annoying to break.
Software teams solved this a fucking eternity ago through shared component and design libraries. Meanwhile, all of these FAANG companies are out here pushing surveillance tools that are all clearly built by siloed teams with zero collaboration.
Even Microsoft did. Their Office Application libraries are phenomenal.
Scriptable object based libraries that work and do so cross platform. It’s a thing of beauty and I’ve never seen MS ever do anything even remotely like it again.
I think it’s just part of this “move fast” mentality. We’re at a point where we’re forced to move so quickly that things get thrown out the window just to meet a deadline.
They’ll do an outlook: cut features from the desktop version until it’s exactly the same as the web version, because every interface needs to be a facsimile of the web, right?
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