Mark T. Tomczak
I'm sitting in a meeting right now watching three high-level engineers at my company ask another engineer to spell out the meaning of equations in his design doc because "the ideas are simple but the formulas make them illegible" and I've never felt more vindicated about my feelings on math symbology in my entire life.
Mar 8, 2024 at 3:42pmWeb
Show threadMark T. TomczakMar 12, 2024

Update: Our engineer is back having taken the feedback from the previous meeting and... prepended to his document a huge table defining all the symbols in the document.

The table is two pages long. 😭

Show threadtrelaneMar 12, 2024
@mark wait, your engineers get to do math?
Show threadottOMar 8, 2024
@mark s/math/regex/g
Show threadMark T. TomczakMar 8, 2024

@ottobackwards I once put, as an error message in a user-facing program, "Invalid name. Names must match the regex ..." and then I spelled out the specific regex we used to check for valid names.

I've never gotten feedback from the UX team so fast in my life.

Show threadAndrew ZonenbergMar 8, 2024
@mark /me looks at entire field of DSP
Show threadMark T. TomczakMar 8, 2024

@azonenberg I had an experience recently trying to delve into the wpilib library used in the #FIRSTRobotics competition to understand how it handled simulating differential drive trains. This was me starting from a naive point of "If I were doing this dumb-guy style, I'd just do timesteps, and every timestep I'd rotate the chassis based on the difference between wheel speeds and translate the chassis forward based on the average of wheel speeds."

Cut to about two weeks of on-again off-again code and doc reading (and YouTube mechanical engineering tutorials) later and I've taught myself enough to read the standard matrix math approach encoded into the library to simulate differential drive trains... Only to discover that it's a matrix-multiplication that encodes "Let the rotation be the difference of the wheel speeds and the translation be the average of the wheel speeds, scaled by time step."

Sonofa....

Show threadLunaphiedMar 9, 2024
@azonenberg @mark oh gods I'm so sorry for you trying to look at wpilib
Show threadMark T. TomczakMar 10, 2024
@Lunaphied @azonenberg All cards on the table: it's been extremely educational and I'm really glad it's out there. I learned so much control systems theory trying to understand it that I wouldn't have had a reason to otherwise, and that was really cool!
Show threadBart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸Mar 9, 2024
@mark @latencyhiding hmm, I am not a big fan of mathematical notation either (especially when it's made up for just one document), but would you say the same about a design doc written in a language you don't speak? Because it's the same.
Mathematical notation is not universal, even imaginary units don't have an universal symbol, but between experts in a given domain and when it's shared, it can help and be much more precise than the language. Symbol = whole concept.
Show threadMark T. TomczakMar 9, 2024

@BartWronski @latencyhiding

I mean... For design docs internal to a company, yes, yes I would. I would and have provided feedback to my ESL colleagues when their sentences aren't close enough to English norms to be easily comprehended. And that's pretty common at every tech company I've worked at (100% of which have been American-owned; were I working in an Indian company owned by a native Hindi speaker / writer and that was the norm for their design docs, I'd hope my colleagues would be genial enough to help me with my crappy attempts to communicate in their language).

Design docs are to get human beings on board with a plan before you commit to the plan via code; you have to write them in the language the readers understand for them to be useful.

So I think you're hitting the nail on the head here... In all the math I've taken from grade school through college, I (and my colleagues) never actually learned how to "speed-read" or "sight-read' math notation, simiar to how, say, a professional musician can sight-read music. Which is interesting and makes me stop and ask myself "How would you teach that?" because clearly it wasn't taught to me or our top engineers.

Show threadRay “Tracing” ChenMar 9, 2024
@mark @BartWronski @latencyhiding I guess the mistake is to consider a “shared language” language like conventions in notation for a “general language” and apply it in the wrong context
Show threadBart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸Mar 9, 2024

@mark @latencyhiding analogy with music notation is spot on. :) I "learned" the "staff notation" as an adult - both reading and writing when composing, but I cannot "sight-read" like professional musicians do. I am more like a first grader who deciphers syllable after syllable.

But then, the answer to the math notation is the same as to sight reading - practice...
Plus in the case of math, also writing in it to build the neural connections. "You don't learn to ride a bike by reading about it".

Show thread⛧TJC⛧Mar 9, 2024
@mark Stephen hawking: “for every equation I put in my books I lose half my readership.”