I agree that figuring out what the symbols mean can be a frustrating part of mathematics, but once that part is done, I find the notation to be lightyears ahead

I agree that figuring out what the symbols mean can be a frustrating part of mathematics, but once that part is done, I find the notation to be lightyears ahead of what normal programming languages can do in the way of communicating an idea directly. Seriously, take any 100 ksloc codebase; how many bugs do you expect to be in there? How many of the developers do you expect to really grok what their code is doing on all functional levels of abstraction? Math papers certainly contain bugs sometimes, even critical ones, but the density of bugs is way lower overall. It's simply much easier to find a bug by staring at a terse one-liner than it is by groveling around 10 pages of "readable" code. Arthur Whitney's code is definitely not approachable, but once you get over the hump, I find it emminently readable compared to what we hackers tend to tout as "readable code." I think most of the debate boils down to different concerns. As a communication tool, what is the function of your code? If it's to introduce ideas to a large audience or many non-inductees, then please, use Python or similar. But if your primary communications are only between the system experts, do you really need to optimize for "this code looks grokkable at first sight"?