[CJefferson]

I'm going to be honest, there is a reason mathematicans drop multiplication (or in general, the most important operator in whatever you are working on), because it would double the size of basically everything you write.

In group and semi-groups, where there is only one operator, it would just produce "visual noise", but introducing a * between every pair of things you write down. I have done this in beginner classes, but it rapidly gets boring.

While I understand how it makes it harder to read for non-experts, when you are writing maths, and maths papers, as a job you don't want to double the size of everything and scatter *s around for no reason.

The best parallel I can think of (this isn't good, sorry) would be like attaching the type of every variable to every place you use it -- this would technically make it easier to follow a snippet of code, but create lots of visual noise.

[alexvoda]

> The best parallel I can think of (this isn't good, sorry) would be like attaching the type of every variable to every place you use it -- this would technically make it easier to follow a snippet of code, but create lots of visual noise.

At some point we did this very thing and it was the recommended way to write code. And it did indeed create a lot of noise. My understanding of how we moved on from that is that namespacing, aliasing, and in general better code structure started being used. Things are no longer global. How do you make parts of mathematical proofs non-global to the entire proof?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation

[CJefferson]

Honestly, I think we could, and should, do much better.

If people generally moved on from LaTeX (which is a whole other argument, and one I've had, and lost, on several occasions) to something with more semantic content, it would be much easier to make papers where it was easy to change the style of formatting, make it clear which symbols are "the same", etc.

[alexvoda]

> which is a whole other argument, and one I've had, and lost, on several occasions

Care to link to it if it's available? I am curious to read that debate.

[CJefferson]

Nothing concrete, I occasionally moan about it on Twitter and here, and in person, for example here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856184

Ironically, given some of the discussion we've been having, the biggest problem with LaTeX is that it is, once compiled into a PDF, extremely non-accessible and that's very hard to fix (to really understand why it's hard to fix, you need to look at how LaTeX works inside, it's a rewriting system and at no point has anything like a semantic description of the maths).