Comment by rf15

As a kid I learned the basics of programming in primary school before learning any math notation beyond the absolute basics. Programming was:

- a strict, limited syntax to lego complex ideas together

- strictly one-dimensional (characters/words in lines)

- variables were written with the intention to speak their semantic role

Coming to math beyond primary school was hilariously emotionally challenging:

- A simple sum described with a sigma symbol: "What? why are you writing all over the place for a simple for-loop or reduce operation? why a specific symbol at all for a trivial +-aggregation?"

- having to help a first year math university student with finding an algorithm to a number packing/division problem: "nobody teaches data structures or dataflow despite the fact it would make things very much easier for everybody?"

- variable 'a', 'b' in complex formulas: "What happened to you? Does your parent not love you? why are you a faceless goon in a sea of other symbols? Stormtropper-ass naming attitude smh. Also making things harder on the reader to digest the algorithm you actually want to talk about so you can be lazy with your pen"

- "Is any old Tom, Dick or Harry just making up multi-dimensional symbols here for every micro algo they come up with?!"

My math skills are okay now, since university was littered with just verbal formal definitions, which made everything easier. From day one I was yearning for a more unified formalisation of everything that was shown to me (or even competing universal formalisations, like in programming languages!), especially since Mathematics seem equally defined by the found insights as it was by the idiosynchracies of the researcher and the math community as a whole. I dreamed of getting the culture out of math, to relieve it from that "impurity" and make it more like my experience in programming, where a basic algorithm could be understood in the abstract and ported to a variety of languages/abstractions/formalisations.

Anyway, that was a kid's dream. Am I better now, team lead at some software company and teaching yyounger people programming and math in my spare time? Nah, I still look at everything with eyes of "How can this be improved?", just the "looks like rubbish to me" attitude has marginally come down.