I'm still undecided on whether Perl 6 takes the TIMTOWTDI motto too far. There seem to be multiple purely cosmetic ways to do something (sigil-less variables), and that's less of a "more tha none way to do it" thing and more of a "more than one way to make it look" thing (colon method call syntax), and I'm not sure how that will work in practice.
Then again, there are lots of things that I think are unequivocally much better, such as method signatures (which you can approximate in Perl 5 with Kavorka[1]) and OOP (which Moops[2] in Perl 5 seems to do a good job of bundling the various Moose family modules together for, with Kavorka).
Learning Perl was a great excercise, after that I could learn JavaScript really easy not only cause they are so similar but cause Perl and its culture teaches you about programming. It is a milestone.
If you cannot read your own code, maybe the issue was your level at the time? no offense intended.
Source?
My experience is about 100 to 1 the opposite. I know tons of programmers that don't know math notation. I know few people at all, even non programmers, that know math notation.
I know 8yrs old that code. They don't know any math.
I understand "sigma notation" and related mathematical symbolism, and can work my way through understanding a formula if I really need to. But given a choice, I let my eyes glaze over and pretend I didn't see the formula. I'm one of those programmers, and I think typically so, who consider math a distant relative whom I give a friendly wave from a distance but not one I like to corner for an intense heart-to-heart.
Increased symbolism front-loads learning to increase expressiveness later. If we've already front-loaded that learning to a small or large part on a large chunk of the population, that can greatly change the equation for how much it slows initial understanding of the code, and thus it's usefulness. As I mentioned elsewhere, we generally use '+' and '-' in programming languages because everyone already knows what they mean. We could just as easily use add(a,b) and subtract(a,b), and in some languages we do so, but in general there's so little friction in using the most basic math notation it's accepted without qualification as a better way to do it.
Every high school graduate that has had a trigonometry course, every college student that has taken any calculus. Tens of millions in the US alone.
> I know 8yrs old that code. They don't know any math.
Sure they do. They know + and -. We use those for the same reason. We could use add(3,4) but we don't (usually).