Programmers: Always use descriptive variable names.

Mathematicians: Single letter variable names always, ideally from obscure/dead alphabets.

Src: Twitter

It's really hard to write a huge equation on a whiteboard when each variable has a name with 10+ characters 😅

Also the combination of letters is ambiguous if you use them, does sun mean s*u*n or the single variable sun

True story

Twitter is not a valid source. That's like saying it's from 'The Internet'. Give the person the damn credit they deserve.

At least you almost tried.

Credit to @DanTwoHundred on Twitter.

Why I hate writing math code. I constantly need to remember a mapping between the single-letter names and my own variables.

@Fydrenak I copied the text, pasted it here but forgot to post it because I got called and after that I continued programming.

A few hours later I came back to devRant but I forgot who's tweet it was, so I just said Twitter.

@Zaphod65 yeah, that's him.

Actually I´m both and I HATE too short variable names when coding :D

@configurator how about writing m_a where a is the math variable and using elsewhere normal variable names. So m_ prefix will mean it's a math variable

@Niteraleph I think the problem is the gap between the maths as written in a text book or whatever, and the code. That issue isn't going to go away any time soon...

@Niteraleph somehow you've managed to come up with an even more confusing method for translating math to code.

In mathematics' defence, it's a lot easier to write 3x + 4 than 3randomVariableName + 4

I study maths and it is hard

Also in CS you with with shit tons of variables but in maths it's mostly one.

That is because they don't have autocomplete!!! Muahaha

While I get the reason for using single letter names in mathematics, I do wish they didn't extend it to programming. Haskell, in particular, encourages single letter names (in certain cases), which can produce totally unreadable code. Eg. It's highly frustrating to see a (Parser a f d s) or something type when you're rushing to meet a deadline.