User talk:Prime.mover

New template
The merit of Template:SourceReview is immediately apparent. Good call. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 22:44, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

A friendly thought
I know we're not on the best of terms, but here's a purely friendly suggestion anyway. Since you enjoy logic, you may also enjoy reading about programming language type systems if you haven't already. Type checking and type inference for type systems with parametric polymorphism are particularly interesting. The Glasgow dialect of the Haskell programming language manages to do almost magical things with its type system extensions, and Chris Okasaki (best known for his book Purely Functional Data Structures) and Ralf Hinze are two of the masters at exploiting these features to enforce complex invariants at the type level. See for example Okasaki's paper "From Fast Exponentiation to Square Matrices: An Adventure in Types". --Dfeuer (talk) 18:46, 13 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm not a fan of Haskell. Having been programming professionally in the software industry for the last 30 years I find I have less and less patience with the effort to takes to learn a new language. I understand that academics may be able to learn all sorts of exciting things by building a language specifically designed to examine this or that, but when you have a customer who won't pay the bill this "this precise effect" is achieved, your emphasis is more on getting the job done than "let's see what fun I can have learning this stuff".


 * Hence my intolerance of sloppy coding and lack of adherence to house styles. There is a reason for imposing a style - it's to ensure consistency of approach which minimises the time taken to get up to speed with another person's code.


 * I don't actually enjoy logic - but in order to establish the minimal requirements to be able to create the axioms from which the number systems could be established foundationally, I had to put the logic pages together. Dirty job but someone had to do it. --prime mover (talk) 19:15, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

History Question
I have recently noticed that you have been enforcing the standard that is to be an almost entirely source based work. An archive of mathematics as opposed to an experimental ground for research.

I have no favourability towards either as both have their place in the world.

But I wonder as looking on waybackmachine.org it seems that PW was not always like this. On Jan 2010 for instance there were only 10 books in the database.

I would like to know what the primary motivating factors behind this shift towards such high standards were:


 * Were people posting poor proofs, invented definitions?


 * Was there a high level of internal inconsistency that necessitated it?


 * Or was it something more?

--Jshflynn (talk) 11:35, 14 March 2013 (UTC)


 * It just seems to make sense. Any mathematical result worth a damn has been published somewhere in some form. With the exception of making explicit some trivial results which are glossed over in the literature, that's about how it is.


 * Recently there has been a trend towards posting up a considerable number of often trivial generalisations of useful working results for no real reason but that the result could be proved. My argument is: unless you're specifically trying to get to something profound, and need it as a stepping-stone, there's limited reason to do so. It was instantly countered that I was spending all my time on propositional logic which is by definition trivial, pointless and a completely solved sytem so who am I to lay down the law?


 * As regards the argument about definitions, well yes, any statement which is equivalent to an existing definition can be used as a definition, but (in many cases) why would you want to? What would be the point in listing a large number of equivalent definitions of an ever more tortuous nature, merely citing the letter of law of some ad-hoc ruling that "equivalent statements are treated as definitions"?


 * Therefore, unless it can be found in the literature as a definition, such equivalences are not taken to be definitions. I don't care how clever a contributor thinks he is - unless responsible for a considerable body of published material, appropriately peer-reviewed and corrected for both accuracy and usability, one's own made-up maths is not going to be treated with the respect that published works are. Because odds-on bet you will find something in a published work that duplicates your own work.


 * Unless, of course, you have genuinely invented a result which is a) profound and b) you really cannot find it published anywhere. --prime mover (talk) 11:59, 14 March 2013 (UTC)