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by marssaxman 1095 days ago
How would the notation be "introduced to you" at all, when reading source code? What book would there be? How would you know how to find it?

This is a serious drawback to the traditional math notation: if you didn't come up along one specific educational pathway, it seems to be effectively impossible to work your way in and figure out what any of it means. You can't pronounce any of it, you can't look it up; even if you can work out the names of the symbols, they often mean different things in different contexts. It is a mess.

For many years now, the way I have ingested CS papers is to read the introduction closely, getting my head around the concept, then bail out once the inscrutable symbols show up and go find an actual implementation in some real, documented, parseable programming language - any one will do - from which I can readily infer what the rest of the paper was supposed to mean.