alt Hacker NewsMy 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`
Replies
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.
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?