Why Don't Computer Scientists Learn Math?
I suspect most of the CS researchers in the room were, in a sense, lying.  I&#x27;m going to guess (a) they could all understand the notation if they tried; (b) they were in fact taught the notation in some undergraduate class, math camp, etc, etc; and (c) what happened is that they <i>intentionally forgot it</i>.<p>At least, this is the case for me!  I think one of the dirty secrets about the CS distaste for many areas of math, including conceptual areas like category theory that are in fact quite closely related to computing and directly applicable there, is that when judged as CS, they don&#x27;t seem like very good CS.<p>For example, a programming-language designer who uses symbols that aren&#x27;t on any keyboard deserves to be laughed out of the room.  What are these weird 19th-century squiggles?  I see what you&#x27;re doing, sort of, but why are you doing it?<p>This is obviously a petty example.  But computer scientists, at least ones with a certain kind of systems background, have put a lot of work into designing abstract logical structures for human beings to use.  They&#x27;ve learned a lot of rules about how to do this well.<p>The corpus of pre-CS math that gets applied to CS doesn&#x27;t seem to care about any of these rules.  It takes a lot of work to come up with a CS aesthetic, and when you have one, your brain only has room for &quot;good&quot; systems that play by your rules.  If a system doesn&#x27;t map to your rules, it&#x27;s almost physically painful to have to contemplate it.<p>Practicality is not quite the issue.  TLA+ seems to be a very useful thing and Lamport has produced a large, large, body of extremely useful work.  At the same time, I can&#x27;t help feeling it would be neat if someone did for TLA+ what Ousterhout did for Paxos.