Actually, learning APL with a sort of "beginners mind" is not that big of a deal. It is sort of adjacent to learning math symbols themselves.

It's just when you start learning other sorts of programming languages you start to diverge.

Strangely nowadays, I think APL is not only adjacent to math, but also emoji.

> APL is not only adjacent to math, but also emoji

Syntactically, mathematicians do tend to communicate via fair lengths of natural language interspersed with [greek with a smattering of hebrew, hiragana, etc.]; it hadn't occurred to me before now that the general population now also communicates with shorter lengths of natural language interspersed with emoji.

Do the generations which grew up with emoji have any less math phobia than mine did?

> fair lengths of natural language interspersed with [greek with a smattering of hebrew, hiragana, etc.]

Also some made up stuff also. For example in financial maths, the the derivative of an option's price with respect to volatility is called "vega". Why? Well because all the other option derivatives are named using Greek letters (delta, gamma, rho etc) and "vega" sounds sort of Greek even though it's just made up.[1]

[1] I haven't heard a convincing etymology for vega in financial maths but it's generally written using the letter "nu" which just looks like a "v" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeks_(finance)#Vega

Pedantry: astronomical vega comes from arabic, واقع .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega#Nomenclature