[OskarS]

Some part of that is bad namespace handling, remove the namespaces and it already looks better:

      thing->Energy = thing->Mass() * pow(speedOfLightInVacuum, 2)

And you can obviously clean it up further by using variables and just write

    auto mass = thing->Mass();
    auto c = speedOfLightInVacuum;

    thing->Energy = mass * pow(c, 2);

    // or thing->Energy = mass * c * c;
    // or thing->Energy = mass * c**2; (for languages that support it)

The issue is that in "E = m c^2", it's obvious from context what everything refers to. In programming languages, that's not necessarily the case. You can have "thing", but also "other_thing" and "array_of_things". And all those things can have many different properties. And those things can be either objects, or pointers to objects.

You're not wrong: it's a definite flaw of many programming styles (and programmers!) that they're "too wordy". But it's also true that mathematics can get by with a bit of ambiguity that humans can handle that computers can't.