On Mon, Apr 27 2015, Scott Jones <[email protected]> wrote: > How is `cholfact` completely clear to the general programming community? > I bet most people, just seeing the name, would think it was some fact about > "chol"...
If there are indeed such people and they are wondering about the function, they can just type help(cholfact) and figure it out. The reverse problem (finding the function that does what you want, instead of figuring out what a given function does) is much more common and difficult to solve, which is why I think that factorize(Cholesky,...) would be just awesome. > Same thing with the explanation of why * was used for string concatenation > (that it screamed "not commutative"... but, I'd also bet, that at least 9 > out of 10 college graduates > would assure you that multiplication *was* commutative, and could point you > to a ton of results on Google to back that up!) [I *do* understand that in > matrix multiplication, a dot product is not commutative, but how many > people, even well educated people, would know that...]) I guess that 90% of people who have a college degree and program had some exposure to intro linear algebra, so they might know it. The rest, of course, are out of luck and will have to google it, which is not a big deal. While I agree that * for strings is unfortunate (in fact, I don't think that strinng concatenation warrants infix syntax), IMO this whole issue is a red herring: all languages have quirks like this, and while minimizing the number of them is a worthy goal, I wouldn't think that these pose the greatest conceptual difficulty when learning Julia. Best, Tamas
