On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
We need at least one forum in which it's acceptable to ask anything, no matter how naive, and get polite replies. (RTFM isn't polite; but "The answer is supposed to be documented here (\url); let us know if that doesn't answer your qn" is fine.) I'd be sorry to lose that.
Agreed. That said, it might be worth developing a "scary maths FAQ" that's an explanation largely of why all the maths and why it may irritate a lot of people to get in a flap about it all. It seems to come up increasingly often, and... well, it's not just the community being elitist or shutting people out! -- flippa@flippac.org The task of the academic is not to scale great intellectual mountains, but to flatten them.