[hatmatrix]

I feel like we haven't even standardized a lot of notation to express ideas in common use...talking about the future of notation is strange as people seem to just invent them as they go and there is no committee that steers this discussion.

[gww]

This is a huge struggle for me as a computational biologist with a computer science background. When I use a published method I try to have at least a cursory understanding of how the method works. However, many of the papers in my field are now statistics and machine learning heavy. The lack of a standardized notation makes the method descriptions very hard for me to follow. Occasionally the source code published alone with the papers is readable and the implementation is much simpler than I expect. But it's not uncommon for the published code to be a pile of spaghetti with no comments or sensible variable names.