Are people not reading the article or are they so primed into thinking that math is a certain way that the authors words are missed?

  > The natural language which has been effectively used for thinking about computation, for thousands of years, is mathematics. Most people don’t think of math as free or flexible. They think of scary symbols and memorizing steps to regurgitate on tests. Others hear math and think category theory, lambda calculus, or other methods of formalizing computation itself, but these are hardly necessary for programming itself.

I very much agree with the author here. It's also just a fact that this was the primary language for centuries. We didn't have programming languages in time of Newton but we did have computation

  > It’s not that programming languages aren’t good enough yet. It’s that no formal language could be good at it. Our brains just don’t think that way. When problems get hard, we draw diagrams and discuss them with collaborators.

This is math. It's not always about symbols and numbers. It's about the relationships. It's not about elegance, even if that's the end goal. Math always starts very messy. But the results you see are usually polished and cleaned up.

I think if you carefully read the author then many of you might be surprised you're using math as your frame of thinking. The symbols and rigor can help but mathematical thinking is all about abstraction. It is an incredibly creative process. But I think sometimes we're too afraid of abstraction that we just call it different names. Everything we do in math or programming is abstract. It's not like the code is real. There's different levels of abstraction and different types of abstraction, but all these things have their uses and advantages in different situations.