Comment by psychoslave

To my mind nothing can be as readable as:

  map some-function of some-parameter, other-parameter to some-parameter apply play-with other-parameter

Which is a more casual way to express:

  def some_function (  some_parameter, other_parameter )= some_parameter .     play_with other_parameter

The latter is actually valid Ruby code, but the former is not valid in any programming language I’m aware of. Yet they are a simple token substitute version of each other. I purposefully placed spaces in the latter to better reflect that.

Note that going a tiny bit further, you could easily get rid of the "apply" token in the former with some convention regarding precedence in denotation.

And yet the whole industry prefer to clutter their communicated ideas with all kind of symbols that are impenetrable to the layman.