Bummer, why does clicking the like button 99 times only produce a single heart? ;-)
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This is true. It is also true that the latter is read out loud as the former.
Anyone will grow accustomed to this, but it first glance it might cause a reader to pause and consider what this actually means. However, wrt: would immediately be clear (to anyone who has worked with differentiation in English)
Best regards, a fellow mathematician-turned-programmer
(although I used to deal mostly with algebra, not so much analysis)
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To me by would immediately be clear whereas wrt would not, having worked with differentiation in English myself.
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My two cents on the subject:
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"wrt" is cryptic.
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"withRespectTo" would be ok in most contexts, but I respect the desire that a fundamental, oft-used function should have a concise name.
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"by" works.
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No matter what it is named, when a user first encounters the function, the user inevitably will read the docs (or a blog post) to become familiar with what the function does and what its parameter labels mean.
@Tino: Thanks for starting a separate thread on this subject. It really helps to focus the discussion. Absent a separate thread, I would not have posted my thoughts on this subject, as I would not have wanted to clutter a very long main thread with an ancillary comment. See, Evolution Process Discussion.
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I'm not a mathematician and I didn't look at the other thread. But: wrt is a thing they would use in Java. Not a thing to be used in Swift. For anything. It goes along with btn and vw and other abbreviations that are sometimes used as variable names or function names or parameter names (not in Java of course). It's not a term of art. DNA, RNA, HTTP and URL are terms of art.
It seems to me that Java code uses these kinds of abbreviations all over the place. The way I read the Swift API Design Guidelines abbreviations of this kind should not be used.
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But it is. And there is ample evidence. It simply is The Name™ of the concept, and it has not a single other contender. I challenge you to find just a single other name used for the (partial) derivative of a function, other than "the derivative of _ with respect to _".
See API Guidelines:
- Avoid abbreviations. Abbreviations, especially non-standard ones, are effectively terms-of-art, because understanding depends on correctly translating them into their non-abbreviated forms.
The intended meaning for any abbreviation you use should be easily found by a web search.
Even though I hate abbreviations in variable of function names, I have to admit that when you Google for "wrt", the first thing that pops up aside from "water restoration technician" is "with respect to".
I am neither a native speaker nor a mathematician, though...
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Of course. "wrt" has many different meanings. I don't think anyone is contending that. Also, the general maning of "with respect to" has nothing to do with maths. It can also mean "with regards to", "with reference to", etc.
However, you're attacking this from the opposite angle. If you start from the derivate, and wants to find out what that concept is called, the answer is "the derivate of _ with respect to _". But if you start from "with respect to _" and ask how what it is used for, I suspect math is pretty far down the list.
The first question has one answer, the second has many ambiguous answers.
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Just to reiterate: I'm fine with withRespectTo: as a more verbose alternative to wrt:
However, any other name is at best confusing, and at worst incorrect.
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The WRT is everyone's favorite new Suziki, isn't it?
We want to eliminate doubt for the viewer when creating a language. Swift is already visually noisy enough.
withRespectTo: or withRegardsTo: needs to be spelled out. It's that simple.
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My two cents as a non native English speaker. I had no idea what wrt was until this thread. It might be familiar to native speakers but it’s probably cryptic to people like me.
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I’m a native speaker, and it wasn’t obvious until I read the thread too.
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Familiarity with it comes not just from English but from mathematical experience. It’s not until you encounter partial derivatives that you need to know what you are differentiating with respect to. You can get quite far in calculus without encountering it. My high school calculus, calculating derivatives to get the slope, second derivatives to find maxima and minima, and applying it to problems in dynamics. with respect to was not needed; you would just say "the derivative of f", "the derivative of the speed" and it was clear.
But the same is true of other areas of mathematics. Many programmers have a mathematical background, but not all do, and so don’t know standard library functions like sin, atan2, log. Or they might recognise the symbols, as they appear in all programming languages, but not know what they represent mathematically.
In the case of "wrt" / "with respect to" you only need to use it if you are doing the sort of calculus enabled by the differential programming proposal. If you were familiar with that sort of mathematics you would be familiar with this term and its acronym.
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I disagree, I‘m pretty sure I had this in Uni but not as wrt as this is the English version of it. You can‘t say that your implication holds true as in other languages it would be totally different beginning letters of the three words. In German for example it would be mit Bezug auf or probably m.B.a.. I doubt that non native English speakers would be able to guess that easily that wrt would be an abbreviation for something they are familiar in their own language, at least this holds not true for this particular example. Other things like sin, cos etc. are more internationalized terms of art which are fine in their abbreviation form. Here I would probably agree with you.
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As I mentioned in the other thread where this started, I'm also a native English speaker and had no idea what wrt stood for.
I think acronyms like this raise the barrier to entry of a particular subject which I think many different areas of expertise are guilty of, not only mathematics and programming. So it raises the question as a community that uses a language that strives for expressivity and inclusivity; do we want something to be approachable to a wider range of knowledge levels, or do we want to cater only for the experienced in a particular subject?
Personally I think inclusion should always win out over exclusion.
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Here is another example from SwiftUI where I was confused when I first read it:
func contentShape<S>(_ shape: S, eoFill: Bool = false) -> some View where S : Shape
What does eo mean in eoFill? Well the docs answer that, but I couldn't figure out that by just reading the function parameter label.
eoFilldefines whether the shape is interpreted with the even-odd winding number rule.
Source: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/equatableview/3267701-contentshape
Sure there is some precedence from other frameworks, but this seems like just an intercompatibility between API's written back in Objective-C era translated to Swift.
Swift does not need to follow Objective-C naming scheme.
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That's true. However, Swift is an English-based language. For better or worse. I don't think that justifies the use of non-standard phrases. It is the term of art in English. And niche concepts sometimes have non-obvious terminology. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If we're ok with a longer to write label, we could spell it out.
I don't question any of that, my point was that I don't think we should force ourselves in adopting all English terms of art from various places just because the language is English-based. We can provide more conveniences to the language users and not please mathematicians that the languages uses their terms of art. If we did otherwise, we probably would have tons of operators I can't even type with my keyboard layout.
Sure in some places it's appropriate to do so, but we don't have to follow that strictly. I agree that in case of wrt it's fine to write the label out as it doesn't really hurt anyone.
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Hello everyone,
I'm happy with wrt. I'm not a native. It is a mathematical term and used broadly. The wrt is not the cryptic name like x, y or a for a random variable or a class. It is an established acronym/word. To learn that wrt means with respect to requires so little effort.
I don't mind having derivative(of: by:). But, I would hate using derivative(of: withRespectTo:). Swift is too wordy already. Please, don't add more noise on top of it.
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As a non-native English speaker, I strongly advise against cryptic acronyms like wrt. Whenever I see an acronym with periods (like w.r.t.) I go searching in my mind which words could be behind the letters in that particular jargon. When I see it without periods (wrt) in a coding context, old assembler codes (write) come up in my mind. I remember w.r.t. from legal jargon, but by the time I got to derivatives in English math jargon, I was already strongly into differential equations with delta notation.
Unlike sin and log, w.r.t. is not international. The French derive par rapport à, which literally means in report of. Ableitungen in German go nach (after) a variable.
by: would be understood by everyone and concise, withRespectTo:verbose but precise.
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