It's about phase transitions. When you understand the system, shorter symbols are easier/faster to reason with. If your primitives are well thought out for the domain, this notation will be the optimal way of understanding it!
On the other hand, longer names help on board new people. Theoretically, you could avoid this issue by transforming back and forth. Uiua e.g. lets you enter symbols by typing out their names. Typing "sum = reduce add" becomes: "sum ← /+". If you transform it back...
Imagine if you could encode the std lib with aliases!
I've originally studied social sciences, so my training uses maths but its core is words.
I dislike symbol only notation. Real words trigger different parts of my brain. I am very good at memorizing content and flow of texts but bad at keeping symbols in my head. I have the same issue with language, e.g. I have no problem with pinyin, but written Chinese characters are taxing me.
I second this, most programmers seem to be fixated on the idea that all code should show at every moment how data types and their values are being passed and tossed around, and they simply ignore or refuse to realise that you can omit it and think in terms of functions fitting the slots.
It's about phase transitions. When you understand the system, shorter symbols are easier/faster to reason with. If your primitives are well thought out for the domain, this notation will be the optimal way of understanding it!
On the other hand, longer names help on board new people. Theoretically, you could avoid this issue by transforming back and forth. Uiua e.g. lets you enter symbols by typing out their names. Typing "sum = reduce add" becomes: "sum ← /+". If you transform it back...
Imagine if you could encode the std lib with aliases!