use Perl

• Much agreed (Score:1)

  by geoffrey (5895)

  Totally right there. I just don't have the attention span to read that crap, so I tend to miss out.
  
  I think part of the problem is that academic papers are not yet optimized for the networked way of doing things.
  
  Aside from way too many being in PDF (*SIGH*), most assume you're coming to them from a background in the field, rather than that you just came from a Google search or a link posted on IRC.
  
  "No, thank you, I don't want to have to spend 15 hours trying to read enough Wikipedia articles to understand t
• mixing the code and the documentation (Score:2)

  by jmm (276)

  An acedemic paper is a curious mix of (in programming terms) code and documentation. It has to be a precise description that can be duplicated by others (i.e. code), but it also has to be understood intellectually by the reader (i.e. documentation). The set theoretic notation is compact and precise, working better as the code formulation; your "translation" works better as the documentation formulation. Best would be to have both, perhaps in a two column layout with the prose "documentation" in one colum
• Ideal point between "verbose" and "cryptic"? (Score:1)

  by naughton (4417)

  More recent papers have the same kind of purely mathematical language, formulating everything in terms of sets, using single uppercase letters for set names and single lowercase letters for variables. Anybody who programs that way is scolded by the community for producing unreadable and unmaintainable code. Yet academic papers, which have much more respect than programmers, continue to use this cryptic notation.

  Ironically, this reminds me of all those critics who dismiss Perl as "line noise." ;^) Many o