> writing it all out at once from top to bottom without breaks
This only happens for toy examples; all real development is iterative, across years and teams. There are a few people who can do Feynman "think very hard and write down the answer", but it's a unique skill of limited availability.
> One question I have about this is why postfix notation is so unpopular versus infix or prefix, where complex expressions in postfix read more like literature where details build up to greater concepts. Is it just because of school?
Developers (you, and the rest of the audience) really need to be able to distinguish between a personal aesthetic preference and some sort of timeless truth.
> Could postfix fix the stem/humanities gap?
I feel fairly confident when anyone posts One Weird Trick nonsense like this that the answer is "no". Especially as postfix is in no way new, it's decades old.
Heck, this is also Anglocentric: there are plenty of human languages which are "postfix", in that they're subject-object-verb rather than subject-verb-object. Such as German and Japanese. Doesn't seem to convey an automatic advantage in either science or literature against the juggernaut of ubiquitous English.
(Mathematical notation tends to use infix operators for some things and prefix operators for others; postfix seems to be rarer? Mostly for units?)
This only happens for toy examples; all real development is iterative, across years and teams. There are a few people who can do Feynman "think very hard and write down the answer", but it's a unique skill of limited availability.
> One question I have about this is why postfix notation is so unpopular versus infix or prefix, where complex expressions in postfix read more like literature where details build up to greater concepts. Is it just because of school?
Developers (you, and the rest of the audience) really need to be able to distinguish between a personal aesthetic preference and some sort of timeless truth.
> Could postfix fix the stem/humanities gap?
I feel fairly confident when anyone posts One Weird Trick nonsense like this that the answer is "no". Especially as postfix is in no way new, it's decades old.
Heck, this is also Anglocentric: there are plenty of human languages which are "postfix", in that they're subject-object-verb rather than subject-verb-object. Such as German and Japanese. Doesn't seem to convey an automatic advantage in either science or literature against the juggernaut of ubiquitous English.
(Mathematical notation tends to use infix operators for some things and prefix operators for others; postfix seems to be rarer? Mostly for units?)