> the Lisp hacker is more likely to ask the irrelevant question: how can I reduce these two functions down to one function?
Except... mathematicians are very frequently going to be doing the same thing: asking if there is some generalization that covers two seemingly independent cases. Otherwise, the author should/would probably be talking about Stirling's approximation instead of the log gamma function in that piece.
More knowledge of mathematics relevant to a given domain an application is written for might often be a good thing -- I think that's an overarching point worth examining.
But if you're going really to look to mathematics as a guiding light, it's not going to be super useful in criticizing the drive for abstraction.
Except... mathematicians are very frequently going to be doing the same thing: asking if there is some generalization that covers two seemingly independent cases. Otherwise, the author should/would probably be talking about Stirling's approximation instead of the log gamma function in that piece.
More knowledge of mathematics relevant to a given domain an application is written for might often be a good thing -- I think that's an overarching point worth examining.
But if you're going really to look to mathematics as a guiding light, it's not going to be super useful in criticizing the drive for abstraction.