Fully agree with this thought. Sloppy notation has been a hindrance to my personal understanding many times. Math made more sense for me when I could code it up and see the function doing things. Everything explicit vs inconsistent shorthand that saved the author a few pen strokes.

Which is why I am so favorable of Jupyter notebook-like teaching environments. Embed the (guaranteed to execute!!! no illegal shorthand) code so that learners can get a true representation that can be manipulated. Although, I think they are still unlikely to reshape education - now you require some coding fluency + the niche math topic.

I think there's also a bit of sneakiness in that by not requiring actual understanding, it's possible to memorize equations and pretend to understand, and then pretend that students got more understanding than in reality.