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Dan Ghica (Jun 01 2023 at 14:47):Our tutorial paper, with @Fabio Zanasi, on hierarchical string diagrams for monoidal closed categories is now on ArXiv. ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18945 ) It is intended for a PL audience. Your comments and suggestions would be highly appreciated.
Simon Willerton (Jun 01 2023 at 18:40):I'm curious. Why does it seem that computer science folk really like two letter abbreviations? Mathematicians say category theory, computer scientists say CT; mathematicians say computer science, computer scientists say CS.
This is apropos of the fact that I don't know what PL stands for. :grinning:
Ryan Wisnesky (Jun 01 2023 at 18:41):It must have to do with typing program code so much. PL = "programming languages", which includes type theory, compiler construction, security, performance etc
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Jun 01 2023 at 19:38):I also could not have guessed that without looking at the paper...
@Simon Willerton a lot worse for me are emails I get advertising conferences and events in research groups without saying what the initialism stands for. How am I supposed to quickly identify whether I could be interested without that information!? Unfortunately, my default has become "if you don't know what it stands for, assume it isn't for you", which I also applied to this case @Dan Ghica , so beware.
John Baez (Jun 02 2023 at 00:34):In math PL means "piecewise linear", but people wouldn't say a talk is "intended for a piecewise linear audience". :robot:
Jason Erbele (Jun 02 2023 at 00:58):I'm not a comp. sci. person, but these revelations are making me doubt my math person credentials. :smirk: It took me maybe 5 seconds to figure it out, but I quickly understood what PL stood for in this context.
Nathanael Arkor (Jun 02 2023 at 05:35):The abbreviation "CT" has frequently been used, for instance, for the Category Theory conference, so it's not a habit I particularly associate with computer scientists.
Dan Ghica (Jun 02 2023 at 07:28):PL means "Programming Languages"
Christian Williams (Jun 02 2023 at 18:25):This is great! Very thorough and motivated, and good clear pictures. (What did you use to make them?) It looks like you've made a valuable resource for computer scientists interested in CT, and vice versa.
Has anyone outside of CT read it yet and given you their thoughts?
Dan Ghica (Jun 03 2023 at 07:44):Thank you, that's very kind. Most diagrams were done with Inkscape and some with TikZit. This is material I taught at a Summer School (Midlands Graduate Studies 2022) and I got good feedback, hence my decision to put it all together in a tidier package. Most of the concepts there are used in our actual compiler implementation work at Huawei, so I got feedback from working programmers.