Having to work with scientists and mathematicians, as in offering my programming help to them... I see no value in making languages look like math formulas. Ma

Having to work with scientists and mathematicians, as in offering my programming help to them... I see no value in making languages look like math formulas. Math formulas are an awful language. It served its purpose to discover how to do things better, but it became obsolete many decades ago. People who hold on to these ideas create truly awful languages like Haskell. These languages make comprehension prohibitively difficult. So much so that a lot of people who would otherwise benefit from using the language and would have enough mental capacity to appreciate its higher-level concepts are prevented from doing so by a very superficial thing s.a. syntax. Also, have had you done any math beyond high-school, you'd not have a problem understanding why the result you see in Ruby makes sense. I think some high schools today also include set theory in math curriculum, which would include concepts like closure, domain / co-domain etc. So... this is really not a good example of the concept you mention. In general, I think that being correct, minimal and internally consistent is a lot more valuable for the language than to be similar to the prior knowledge newcomers might have. It's nice to be also newcomer-friendly, but that shouldn't come at the expense of sacrificing any of the aforementioned desirable properties.