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Mathematicians use very terse notation in formulas, but accompanied by a lot of natural language text. The equivalent in programming would be terse code with long comments and documentation.

Many programmers instead see self-documenting code as the ideal outcome: maybe not very compact, but virtually free of comments (and with documentation at least partially autogenerated).

In reality, successful open-source projects tend to have many comments in the source code. Often not one-liners, but detailed descriptions of functions, their arguments and algorithms, motivation for the choice of the implementation and so on.



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