0 sats \ 1 reply \ @pillar 20 Jul 2023 \ on: RANT: Cryptography and Algorithm Papers Should Use Code, Not Math Notation tech
I personally agree that there are many concepts I couldn't read in mathematical notation but would be trivial to understand with code.
Having said that, I think this is all about personal bias. People used to math notation feel their notation is obvious. Programmers feel their code is obvious. Normal people think we are all crazy.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k18 OP 20 Jul 2023
Yeah, personal bias about subjects that really need to be properly hashed out.
Like, can we have a conversation about:
  • The absurd energy costs and time costs of object oriented languages?
  • The encryption of algorithms in non-progammerly notation, without any adequate human language equivalent.
  • The fact that all programs are running on multiprocessors now, can we kill Von Neumann already?
    • And thus also, why none of the languages you have to learn for most programming jobs these days do not have any support for concurrency as a first class citizen of the language (it should be in the reserved word/symbol list!).
      • And the fact that even when your program is serial on the network it is now part of a multi-computer processing system and all the rules of sync and locking and concurrency suddenly apply to everything.
  • Writing out set notation saves zero space in the paper compared to the venn diagram version because the legend is half a page long. It's like making up a new set of icons to draw a map and then spending the same amount of time explaining what each icon represents.
  • Programmers have to read these things and write accurate, and secure code with it.
But we all know those in their ivory towers never get bug reports or angry stories from users about their data or even livelihood being destroyed by the code that was written from this encrypted "academic" paper.
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