You're the second commenter, so far, to mention exclamation marks. What do they mean to you that would bother you so much to point it out, or anyone for that matter? I haven't even noticed them until I read the comments here on hn.
Not gp, but I feel similarly. For me, I can't help read it with emphasis. As in, the voice in my head gets all fancy in an annoying way. If you imagine someone in person reading it out-loud with exaggerated emphasis, that's what it feels like. Same thing with comic books for me, the sprinkled bolded words in dialog are really grating.
To me it's fairly similar to someone making excessive use of CAPS LOCK. It can be used as a stylistic choice at times, but use it TOO MUCH and it just becomes DISTRACTING.
I DON'T SEE A PROBLEM WITH THIS EITHER! BUT I EMPATHIZE! I GET COMMENTS FROM PEOPLE SAYING THAT I'M SOMEHOW YELLING AT THEM ALL THE TIME BUT I'M ACTUALLY SITTING IN SILENCE, TYPING QUIETLY ON A MEMBRANE KEYBOARD! LOL???
Oh this is nothing. One of my colleagues does that and adds random colour changes, underlines and font face changes. It's like working with a serial killer.
Ahh. I honestly miss that amount of self-expression, garish as it was. Or rather, I intensely dislike the mono-culture where every vertical video with one-word subtitles looks the same.
Interesting topic, but the writing style is so tedious that it really subtracts from the content as a whole. There's on average one exclamation mark per paragraph. Surely every single thought you write down isn't groundbreaking enough to warrant that.
I beg to differ, I think the writing conveys beautifully, the deeper abstract ideas embedded in what appears to be a simple problem - hence, it captures the essential spirit of what math is about
I like when the author’s personality shines through, and frankly I can’t imagine finding occasional exclamation marks _tedious_ of all things. I just don’t take things so seriously, I suppose.
Just out of curiosity, why do you find the code horrid? There are really only 9 lines of code that aren't glue code, and apart from the error prints (which are really irrelevant for these demonstration purposes), the code looks basically fine to me.
EDIT:
seen = []
for b in boards:
if set(seen).isdisjoint(orbit(b)):
seen.append(b)
Sage is a Python (and the snippet you pasted works fine in Python). And I'm also curious what would qualify that code as "horrid." I'd make light suggestion to improve performance by making `seen` a set right off the bat, but for this size of problem, that sort of detail is unimportant. Calling somebody's code "horrid" without even understanding what it's doing isn't a productive approach to, well; anything, really.
Math pages on Wikipedia have this bad. I don’t know whether the programming concepts pages are more sanely written or I already understand the circular reasoning. But it feels like they’re more approachable.
The math pages on Wikipedia value correctness above lay comprehensibility. It's easy to understand how this happens: a learned mathematician points out that a simplification for the purposes of making an explanation more approachable is not actually correct, so the explanation gets desimplified... and repeat ad absurdum until most math pages on Wikipedia cater primarily to experts and are too advanced for a good fraction of the audience.
I love the math pages on Wikipedia but I have a math degree. They are written (written clearly and concisely) for mathematicians.
If you're a programmer (but don't have a math degree) then I would offer up API docs as a comparison. They are written for you, the user of the API, to be as concise and straightforward as possible so that you can get up and running with the API. API docs are definitely not written for beginners who have never written a line of code (or a line of code in the language the API is written in) before.
If there's one complaint I may entertain, it's that Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a resource for specialists. It's intended to be an encyclopedia for a general audience. But then by that reasoning, many of these math pages on Wikipedia probably ought to be deleted outright because they're simply too specialized in the first place. So we're left with the dilemma: do we keep these articles as-is (and keep mathematicians happy) or do we delete them outright because they're too specialized?
The third option, rewriting them for a general audience, is likely to run afoul of Aesop's fable #721 "The miller, his son, and the donkey" [1]. You'll get a highly technical and complex article that explains far too much and buries its insights in overly verbose and cumbersome prose (which cannot assume any prerequisite mathematical knowledge). It'll please neither the mathematician nor the general audience member.
It's not. The language of mathematics is prose, usually written in English. The formulae are meant to illustrate the relationships in a very concise way but they're meaningless without the accompanying prose.
Thinking about it I guess MSN messenger and My Space also allowed/encouraged font shenanigans? My memory falters
But, 99.9% of every other glyph on the page is over my head, so I guess I haven't ground to stand on.
Just out of curiosity, why do you find the code horrid? There are really only 9 lines of code that aren't glue code, and apart from the error prints (which are really irrelevant for these demonstration purposes), the code looks basically fine to me.
EDIT:
Ah, well...EDIT 2: also, see comment below, it's not Python
If you're a programmer (but don't have a math degree) then I would offer up API docs as a comparison. They are written for you, the user of the API, to be as concise and straightforward as possible so that you can get up and running with the API. API docs are definitely not written for beginners who have never written a line of code (or a line of code in the language the API is written in) before.
If there's one complaint I may entertain, it's that Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a resource for specialists. It's intended to be an encyclopedia for a general audience. But then by that reasoning, many of these math pages on Wikipedia probably ought to be deleted outright because they're simply too specialized in the first place. So we're left with the dilemma: do we keep these articles as-is (and keep mathematicians happy) or do we delete them outright because they're too specialized?
The third option, rewriting them for a general audience, is likely to run afoul of Aesop's fable #721 "The miller, his son, and the donkey" [1]. You'll get a highly technical and complex article that explains far too much and buries its insights in overly verbose and cumbersome prose (which cannot assume any prerequisite mathematical knowledge). It'll please neither the mathematician nor the general audience member.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_miller,_his_son_and_the_do...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung#Quantum_mechani...
It is actually physics, but for all I know it could just as well summon Cthulhu.
The math pages look like they’re trying to be Perl one-liners. Why is everything so jammed up, Mathematics?
It's not. The language of mathematics is prose, usually written in English. The formulae are meant to illustrate the relationships in a very concise way but they're meaningless without the accompanying prose.