DeVliegendeHollander comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - Less Wrong

31 Post author: JonahSinick 04 May 2015 05:11AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 11 May 2015 07:57:00AM *  0 points [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_(mathematics)#Genesisandevolutionofthe_concept

Also, being very frugal with token length seems to be a thing into the 1960's, see Unix e.g. "ls -l" instead of the far more human eye friendly "list -long" I don't exactly understand why but apparently this wasn't really a priority until about, say, 1995 when more and more programmers said fsck Perl with its unreadably frugal letter soup and use stuff like Python, where things are expressed in actual words.

I guess there are good reasons behind it. I still don't have to like it.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 14 May 2015 10:59:13AM *  3 points [-]

To get the link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_(mathematics)#Genesis_and_evolution_of_the_concept
use the following code in your comment:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable\_(mathematics)#Genesis\_and\_evolution\_of\_the\_concept](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_(mathematics\)#Genesis_and_evolution_of_the_concept)

See Comment formatting/Escaping special symbols on the wiki for more details (I've backslash-escaped underscores _ in the text part of the link to avoid their turning surrounding texts into italics, and the closing round bracket in the URL part of the link to avoid its interpretation as the end of the URL).