smt1

When people see for example, * or + (or a, b, c). They may have some preassumptions about some implied associativity from arithmetic (depending on what they are taught and what level of math they are at), that may be hard to break. If you have learned some college (abstract) algebra, it may mean something quite different. How about the = sign? Of course, a, b, c may be meaningless to someone who is not a native latin-1 speaker either. My point I guess is that these are just matters of convention, there is just some implied commutativity or associativity usually implied, but this is all arbitrary.

Now, one intereting "quirk" with with PL/I was that certain things looked similar "to what people were used to" (relative to say other PL/I code, or FORTRAN or COBAL), but worked differently even in some small spatial area on a screen (two blocks of nearby code in some editor). For example, if the programmer's eye saw a block of code, reflexively, depending on their experience they may be able to predict what the result of the computation could do. PL/I was an interesting experiment because of the lack of reserved keywords. This made it very expressive but very hard to understand code in context. For example, in pseudo PL/I: foo = 1; = = 2; bar 2 + foo. You are basically changing the grammatical syntax of the language in 3 lines.

But on the other hand, everything is just a symbol and this may not be completely unusual. Consider the diversity of the world's languages and how they are written and how meaning is derived. Natural language grammars may connotate very different representations and transformations, but people learn because they see enough examples. Consider for the differences between Han, Brahmic scripts, Arabic BiDi, various African scripts, Cuneiform, Emoji, whatever. Perhaps all computer languages are "overfit" due to for example, Chomsky's ideas and BNF (keep in mind Chomsky's ideas about morphology were quite different).

Now, let's consider mathematical notation. Depending on how much pure math (or say, mathematical physics or other sciences) you consider, there may be more and more semantic overhead with the conventions of mathematical notation, and people often historically just "cartesianize" and "euclidized" things for convenience because of lack of tooling (think of a sheet of paper metaphor, we've simply moved it over to a computer. it's a skewmorph). Clearly we have better computer graphics, so why haven't developer tools and languages changed along with it? Maybe with more immersive manipulation they will.

If you know haskell, Rust's traits are very similar to type classes, except it also has c++-like generics (templates) and is primarily expression-based like ocaml.

traits vs haskell type classes:

trait -> class struct -> data instance -> impl