This is absolutely true, but it still seems to me that we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water when we just stick to extremely terse symbols for everything regardless of context.

Reading articles would be so much easier if they used even slightly longer names – thankfully more and more computer science articles do tend to use more human readable naming nowadays, at least.

Sure, longer names make manipulation harder a bit more annoying if you’re doing it by hand, but if you do need to manipulate something you can then abbreviate the terms (and I’m 60% sure I’ve seen some papers that had both a longer form and a shorter form for terms, so one for explaining shit and one for the fiddly formal stuff)

Of course using terse terms is totally fine when it’s clear from the context what eg. ∆x means.