16 Jan
2009
16 Jan
'09
12:55 a.m.
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 18:21 -0500, Cale Gibbard wrote:
While you're absolutely correct and I agree with you, to be fair, essentially all mathematicians have a sense of "rigourisability" (whether they recognise it or not), which is a peculiar standard that they apply to everything they hear or read. The level of rigour at which mathematicians communicate is designed not to bore the listener with details that they could easily supply for themselves, being an intelligent mathematician, and not a mechanical abstraction.
Indeed. One way to describe "rigorizable" is that it is (ideally) just enough precision to be unambiguous. Programmers don't have that luxury and thus clarity and hence communication suffer, which was exactly my point.