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> You basically get into a situation where you need to be able to read and comprehend math-like lines of code. Which doesn’t seem to mesh well with the structur

> You basically get into a situation where you need to be able to read and comprehend math-like lines of code. Which doesn’t seem to mesh well with the structure of nature language. "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" has a few paragraphs about this. He points out that language has some intentional redundancy, because humans are unreliable and require it. But programming language designers are often skilled in logic, and prefer that to verbose "human" communication. The language referenced is APL, but it made me think of functional languages which have a lot of custom infix operators, etc.

Gibbon1 4y ago
> But programming language designers are often skilled in logic, and prefer that to verbose "human" communication. Reminds me of a thing my dad quoted about the problem with Newtonian Notation. AKA dot notation or fly spec notion. Because with it a fly can do differential math. As a result people use different notation usually. That said redundancy allows for both readability by humans and better resync by parsers when there are errors. And it's easier to code gen and auto refactor code.