It's funny that you should mention this, because I see a close correspondence to a tendency here, on Hacker News, to use the C language's logical symbols like !

It's funny that you should mention this, because I see a close correspondence to a tendency here, on Hacker News, to use the C language's logical symbols like !, !=, and == instead of the plain English not, not equal, and equal. I know that a lot of people here are not programmers, and of those that are, some are surely not programmers of C or its descendants. I think that, in philosophical literature at least, using symbols is a way of signalling that something is meant precisely, whereas using everyday words is perhaps less so.