This said, my context is always data-analysis/modeling. I’ve never felt intimidated by code, though I spent many years being intimidated by certain formulae. I’m fairly certain that I’d have pursued math to a much higher level in school if the symbolic expressions were pseudo code I could mess with, but this may just be my odd learning style.
Every process that has moved to computers has seen immense productivity enhancements. Production of written text, audio editing, video editing, engineering drafting, all of these things involve producing a ton of unique information in a workflow. Copy/paste, versioning (even primitive versioning saving old docs), undo/redo, and re-arranging large groups of content are just so powerful that you can't go back to life without them once you can use then second nature in a given context.
I’m merely saying that in terms of symbolic representation of math, I’ve personally found code or pseudo-code the fastest to understand (but I’m not a professional mathematician!).