So I'm not a mathemetician, certainly not anymore. But for a while I did read a lot of this stuff, and wrote things like it. Aaand... to some extent you get u

So I'm not a mathemetician, certainly not anymore. But for a while I did read a lot of this stuff, and wrote things like it. Aaand... to some extent you get used to it. But it really is simply a worse syntax. It's not just habit. For one thing, there does not exist such a thing as "mathematical notation". There are a bunch of different, semi-overlapping conventions. You can't trivially read something someone wrote if the math was for another field. In fact, I'm pretty sure the variance is even larger than for most (seriously used) computer languages. It's easier for a pythonista to grok C++ templates than it is to read physics-inspired math with a modal-logic background. This is particularly true when it comes to conventional symbols; there just aren't enough, or perhaps it's history, but there are different symbols for the same concept, and different concepts for the same symbol. Another pet peeve is subscripts - are those formally meaningless tags to distinguish variations the author talks about? are they arguments of some other class (think type arguments vs. value arguments)? Are they something elses? It's quite common for articles to use various forms, and sometimes even on the same symbols; for an example (albeit with superscripts) you probably know: X^T as a transpose, but X^2 as a power. Then there are things like context sensitivity. It's not uncommon for some notation not to be self-contained in the sense that an expression depends on some variable, but that that variable is never specified in the expression itself. It's taken for granted you know which those are, and that can get quite tricky. It's the mutable global state of programming. Mathematics could definitely benefit from a more disciplined and rigorous approach when it comes to notation, at least, IMNSHO.