> The traditional static symbolic notation of math may be the most efficient one... If people had Excel before, we'd never know Gauss sequence sum formula, we'd let the system help us.
I think some people in this thread must be using "notation" in a different sense than I am accustomed to. I don't think of the computer's ability to automate addition as an innovation in "notation", per se.
That wasn't Sussman's point. The problem is that the same notational forms -- the same orthographies, if you will -- can mean different things in different contexts. It doesn't help at all that one must, on occasion, slip from context to context in the same argument, producing adjacent or near-adjacent statements that have similar general forms but wildly different meanings. His solution to the problem was to use a notation that also happens to be valid statements in a computer language he had a large hand in designing. That part isn't necessary, but disambiguating mathematical notation by some means is.
I think some people in this thread must be using "notation" in a different sense than I am accustomed to. I don't think of the computer's ability to automate addition as an innovation in "notation", per se.