Comment by lvncelot

Completely agree. In uni, I (re)-learned about vectors in linear algebra, and for a good chunk of the course, we didn't write anything in "standard vector notation". We learned about vector axioms first, and then vectors were treated as "anything that satisfies the vector axioms". (When doing more practical examples, we just used the reals instead of something like R^3, but the entire time it was clear that for any proof, anything that can be added and multiplied in the way that the vector axioms describe would fit.) I think adopting this structuralist view really helps with a lot of mathematical studies.