As I understand author’s point, your example with “sum” is only valid because “sum” word has very few meanings, especially in software engineering world.
Even the word “product” would introduce certain ambiguity in context of real world codebase: is it “math” product or some “domain” product?
It’s even worse with most other words.
So if in any given codebase you still have to know the specific meaning of every word, how is it different from having to know specific meaning of every K symbol?
> So if in any given codebase you still have to know the specific meaning of every word, how is it different from having to know specific meaning of every K symbol?
So you never encountered namespaces then? Because that's why you use namespaces.
The number of symbols is limited, which is the reason why the whole "a symbol is more explicit"-argument simply doesn't hold in general. It breaks apart pretty quickly.
That's why you'll find the following sentence pretty much verbatim in most maths and cs publications:
"Throughout this paper, unless otherwise specified, we use the following notations," followed by half a page of definitions.
Plot twist: different authors often use different notation even within the same field of research.
Even the word “product” would introduce certain ambiguity in context of real world codebase: is it “math” product or some “domain” product?
It’s even worse with most other words.
So if in any given codebase you still have to know the specific meaning of every word, how is it different from having to know specific meaning of every K symbol?