I, on the other hand, am dreaming of being able to use mathematical notation in my code. Sort of like what Fortran has helped with, only on a much larger scale.
As with a lot of things, some people may enjoy arduous and very low-yield process for all sorts of reasons. I, for example, like baking sourdough bread.
As with the bread, which comes out more or less comparable quality to what I can buy from the local grocery in exchange for much less effort, I get certain satisfaction from doing it myself. But, if I had to do this on an industrial scale (and I worked in a bakery, although very briefly), I'd want to kill myself if I had to deal with the same kind of process.
Math language is very similar in this regard. It's kind of nice, like a calligraphy piece. Sometimes it takes a master month to write just a few words in a visually appealing way, but if this was the expectation for everyday boring tasks, that'd be a completely different story.
Low-effort may be if you are writing with a pen on paper, or chalk on the board. It's anything but even with systems like LaTeX.
Just to put this in perspective: in the days of me being a student, I got a gig at the state hotel for official guests. They had a guest book and the honored guests would usually leave an autograph in it. They hired me to use calligraphy to write the name and the title of the guest. Usually, that meant two, sometimes one line with just two or three words each. So, let's say four words per page. I would do about ten pages per day (they had couple years of backlog).
My typical workload in the newspaper for a day was somewhere between 16 and 24 A3 pages (this includes everything from inputting the text into the system, editor editing it, proof-readers reading it and me running back and forth between the editor and proof-readers to convince the editor to find a different image / add or remove a paragraph etc. If memory serves, that's about under 1K words per page. So, 16K-24K words per day (compared to 40 words per day of calligraphy).
With the math textbook, we did about a page a day, and it was closer to A4, so, under 500 words. Also, of course, the formulas are just a small fraction of the algebra textbook: most of it is prose: proofs or some general discussion about the subject. Of course some diagrams (but that's comparable to the newspaper).
So, while not as bad as calligraphy, math textbook was at least two orders of magnitude harder than newspaper, and only an order of magnitude easier than calligraphy.
NB. Newspapers aren't the easiest job in terms of putting text on paper. It's actually quite involved and paginators are under quite a lot of pressure to finish things on time, especially for the daily papers. If you are looking for the lowest effort / highest yield, something like the War and People (or is the traditional English translation the War and Peace?) would be your best bet. You can do hundreds of pages per day, even with moderate amount of illustrations.
> math notation is indeed high-yield and low-effort
low-effort is perhaps “your mileage may wary”, as they say :) but the yield per square inch of paper does indeed make math the most powerful and expressive language known to humans. On that note, Ken Iverson was very concerned that tons of mathematical symbolic conventions and speak overlap and conflict with each other to an obscene degree. As we all know, that little book he wrote on this very subject eventually got him a Turing award when people finally realized what he did there.
That said (and please no offense APL and typography fiends who are reading this) a considerable portion of the funny APL chars was a hard compromise dictated by economics and physics of IBM Selectric typeball.
With that in mind, if you take a fresh look at the original APL charset, you will see that much of it is stone-stupid overtypes of two ASCII chars.
