On 1/13/12 11:31 PM, Chris Smith wrote:
Anyone want to hazard a guess what percentage of Haskell programmers can even name every letter of the Greek alphabet? I'm betting less than 10%.
That's easy for anyone with a classical education (or far too much mathematics education). There may well be less than 10% of Haskellers who have such, but Greek letters are rather trivial to learn. The problems arise when suddenly everyone needs to know the names of all the graphemes of Cyrillic, Amharic, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew,... (because there are a great number of writing systems, and because they are relatively unknown having not been coopted by the mathematical tradition) or when everyone needs to know the names of all the obscure symbols mathematicians have come up with over the years (because generally they've never been named in the first place). -- Live well, ~wren