[Someone]

> Engage with why you feel so strongly that anything other than rigid adherence to tradition is sacrilege

Who’s saying that? Inventing good notation is a big part of mathematics (and that also frequently gets criticized on HN because it may introduce ambiguities)

Also, there’s nothing wrong with texts that target an audience with a certain level of understanding.

It’s not as if adding, for example, “By Hermetian matrix we mean a complex square matrix that is equal to its own conjugate transpose” will make a paper much easier to understand, just as adding a comment “this is where the program starts running” doesn’t help much in understanding your average C program, or adding a definition of “monarchy” to a history paper.

In the end, any scientific paper has to be read critically, and that means making a serious effort in understanding it. A history paper, for example, may claim that Foo wrote “bar” but implied “baz”. A critical reader will have read thousands of pages, and (especially if they disagree with the claim) then think about that for a while, and may even walk to their bookshelf or the library to consult other sources before continuing reading.