[Silhouette]

Developers (humans) prefer meaningful variable names, method names, expressions, etc.

Well, isn't that part of the premise we're debating?

Mathematical papers and books tend to have the advantages of dealing with only a handful of concepts at any given time, and of presenting their mathematical content in relatively small doses, both of which allow concise notation to remain both unambiguous and accessible enough to be useful. Anything other than the smallest programs probably do not enjoy the same advantages, so it makes sense that programmers tend to use longer names for entities that are relevant over a larger area. However, this argument still allows for short names to be used in programs as long as the scope is also small, and it says nothing at all about the relevance of natural language for representing programming language constructs.

We have some experience with programming languages that do try to read very much as natural human language. COBOL is probably the most famous example, and in that language even basic mathematical concepts like comparisons can be written out in words. We don't write much COBOL today, and it's hard to believe that the verbosity isn't a contributing factor in that.

[benas]

No, you are deviating from the main point: natural expressiveness. So let me back up: If you think "if (= x 1)" is natural to humans, then try to ask someone in the street "is equals this that?" and let me know about their reaction. My point is that the natural way of asking such questions is:

  * "Is this equals to that?" and not "is equals this that?"
  * "Is this bigger than that?" and not "is bigger this that?"

And this is regardless of the language (be it English or whatever, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811168). I'm not going to debate this to death, so feel free to disagree. Again, I have nothing against Clojure, I'm just trying to argue in a constructive way.