[grosjona]

I remember thinking the same thing after reading https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/equals-as-assignment/

Math symbols and expressions are inconsistent just like regular languages. But, unlike math, other languages don't claim to be consistent.

It's not surprising that John von Neumann said "in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." - I've never heard a software developer say this about coding.

For example, I did not enjoy integrals at school because of the 'dx' at the end which means 'with respect to x' but which actually looks like a multiplication (* d * x).

I think that the reason why I never got deep into math is because the language of math is too inconsistent and has too many logical shortcuts and I can't operate in such environment.

[analog31]

My understanding was that the "d" is an operator, and there are notations in which an operator on an operand is notated by just putting the one before the other. Also, the dx corresponds to delta x in the limit definition of the integral. One reason for keeping it, is that it makes the units of measure work out if the integral involves things that have units. So, notational consistency aside, it saved my arse when doing physics problems. ;-)

(even in my pure math classes, I sometimes imagined that the variables had units, to help find mistakes).

But your point is well taken about the consistency of math notation. Math spent most of its history being scribbled by hand and read by humans. It got the job done. And it was not uncommon to invent a new notation on the fly to replace an abstraction with a single symbol. That's the precursor to the subroutine.

The need for perfect formality of notation is a new thing, brought on by the computer age. This may illustrate the point that programming is not "just math," and math is not a form of programming.

[fjsolwmv]

> I've never heard a software developer say this about coding.

This is sarcasm, right? We say this all the time about legacy spaghetti code or excessively clever magic our languages or (closest to von Neumann's statement, perhaps) the mountain of APIs and libraries and OS we use..