My example was contrived, I'm sure some smart people could come up with a SQL-esque language that is even more readable to non-technical folks than programming syntax. At a certain point though, your layman has to know the "atomic" (as in, you can't break them down further) mathematical concepts like "functions" and "infinity":

`sum function(x) from x=0 to x=infinity`

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BlackFingolfin 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am a research mathematician. In my field (abstract algebra, computational group theory), a sum or some such notation is like the most trivial of trivial things in terms of notation. There are a few things like sums that could in theory be made to "look more like what a computer programmer would expect", but that'd be just a tiny corner of it.

And if you think about how summation would look in Lisp or APL (which some smart people use to this day), I am not even convinced your argument for the "sum function" notation being superior holds in general.

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xyzzyz 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sure some smart people could come up with a SQL-esque language that is even more readable to non-technical folks than programming syntax.

And somehow, none of the thousands of very smart mathematicians have done that, or if they had, it has not seen wide adoption. I recommend contemplating on this: if math could be made easier by changing notation, why hasn't this already happened?

	▲	umvi 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Momentum, mainly. Richard Feynman invented a more intuitive triangle-based syntax for sin/cos/tan/etc but eventually abandoned it and conformed with mathematical norms for the sake of ubiquity.