I mean you’ve just translated from a language most people don’t speak to a different language most people don’t speak

Part of what’s going on here is that math notation is … not good. Not for understanding, readability or explanation. Add in the prestige that surrounds being “good at math” and “being able to read that stuff?” and you get an unhealthy amount of gate keeping.

Whenever I’ve been able to find someone breakdown a set of equations into computer code has been a wonderful clarifying experience. And I think it goes beyond just being better at code or something. Computer code, more often, is less forgiving about what exactly is going on in the system. Maths, IME, often leaves some ambiguity or makes some presumption in the style of “oh, of course you’d need to do that”. While if you going to write a program, it all needs to be there, explicitly.

I recommend Brett Victor’s stuff on this: Kill Math