[marssaxman]

> Imagine having to do math with no symbols.

I would probably prefer this, because then I could actually look up the unfamiliar terms and have some hope of eventually figuring out what the equation meant, instead of being brought up short and stumped by inscrutable notation.

[why218]

even for actual calculations? if so then touche. But (and I may be wrong) I feel like this comment is coming from a place of I need to look up some formula which for some other task. Like say im making a video game and I want some geometry formula. In such a case what you care about is not how easy a notation is to use but simply getting info as fast as possible in which case learning new symbols just gets in the way rather than actually writing correcting algebraically manipulating and extending (keep in mind im using math as an analogy for programming in not actually speaking about array languages being used _for_ math necessarily). This is a fair criticism of array langauges you do need to learn something which is quite different from the usual english based languages and they are not great for black boxing i.e you have to know the domain of your problem because relying on libraries is impossible at worst and not any better than python or java at best. That being said I find them more scrutable than most langauges partly because of the tersity. And partly because of the limited vocabulary. You can look up unfamiliar operators very easily in array languages because they all come with multiple (some more for reference some more for learning) easy to go to places to do so. But more importantly there really are only so many so you can learn them all (in the same way you already learned your numbers + - 3 %, and so on) once you do you dont feel the need to look up 6 or & or + mean you just know them. In contrast in a language like python or javascript im constantly looking up how things work because there are just infinitely more things the source code of which is often hard to get to and when you find it it is very long (and therefore (for me) hard to read). When I see an array function I actually can scrutinize them when I see a python function I need to hope that its simple and named in a way that makes automatic sense to me or give up and look it up somewhere else (in docs say).

[marssaxman]

That's fair. My remark was a bit of a tangent, borne of frustration over years of trying to read papers relevant to my interests where the juicy bits are all written in math notation and therefore inaccessible. I have to go track down some open-source implementation of the idea and read that to understand what the paper is trying to say - any programming language at all, even one I've never seen before, will be easier to understand than the original symboldegook.

I can imagine that it's a much different situation with array languages, where the notation is actually learnable, because it is defined and documented.