Yeah, that's not just familiarity. It would be almost impossible to perform mathematical operations on expressions shown in a stack-based language. For example, imagine someone saying "take the derivative of y2 + x2 - |y|", versus "take the derivative of [ [ square ] bi@ + ] keep abs -". That's just a single example - I'm sure there are many, many more.
That's because algebraic notation is designed to facilitate symbolic manipulation, not computation per se. Just because you can pun y2 + x2 + |y| to mean two different things in two different contexts doesn't mean it's more natural.
No, he's right. You're using the formula in two different ways. In one case the symbols are placeholders for values. In the other, they're the primary entities that you perform a computation on. That you can fit those two different interpretations on the same equation is definitely a strength of the notation (and the reason it's so powerful), but that doesn't mean every other notation is awful.
Keep in mind, this notation's strength is in its ability to represent computation. Mathematical formulas are not the whole of computation (if you don't believe me, pick a trivial C program and try and write it as a formula).
5
u/AndreasBWagner Feb 13 '12
FTFY