Saying that expressions independently denote a value is misleading. You can't know what an expression means without knowing the definition of each symbol it uses, and those symbols come from the expression's environment. These symbols may be defined in terms of other symbols, in turn, and the dependency graph of a large program is by no means simple.
Examples that use well-known mathematical functions give a misleading impression that such expressions will be easy to understand. Instead, it can become like puzzling over the meaning of the equations in a mathmatics paper. As the author discovered, this isn't always easy, particularly for unfamiliar mathematical objects, and it tends to appeal more to people with a background in mathematics.
Also notice that the focus on the value of an expression hides all performance issues. Maybe we can specify what an animation should do, but that doesn't mean it will run smoothly. It can be valuable to cleanly separate so-called "correctness" from performance (as if a program that's too slow is somehow correct?), but this doesn't relieve the programmer of the responsibility to work on performance. Languages that don't give you the tools to control performance are incomplete.
Examples that use well-known mathematical functions give a misleading impression that such expressions will be easy to understand. Instead, it can become like puzzling over the meaning of the equations in a mathmatics paper. As the author discovered, this isn't always easy, particularly for unfamiliar mathematical objects, and it tends to appeal more to people with a background in mathematics.
Also notice that the focus on the value of an expression hides all performance issues. Maybe we can specify what an animation should do, but that doesn't mean it will run smoothly. It can be valuable to cleanly separate so-called "correctness" from performance (as if a program that's too slow is somehow correct?), but this doesn't relieve the programmer of the responsibility to work on performance. Languages that don't give you the tools to control performance are incomplete.