> Remember that a lot of mathematics is converting your system into another system
Claude Shannon had something to say about this as I recall.
> Do you have another suggestion? Because I don't see how code, English, or literally any other thing that can be written down is anything more meaningful than "a bunch of squiggles."
The difference is that the squiggles appear on your keyboard. If you use modern language to construct a variable name, the name can be suggestive of what it is to someone already fluent in natural language. Multi-character names also reduce collisions -- there are only so many Greek letters. And then the research paper doesn't show an inscrutable glyph as a JPEG that you can't even copy and paste into a search engine if you don't already know what it represents.
Shannon said a lot of things, you'll have to be a bit more specific to jog my memory.
Shannon would tell you that there can only be so many simple __distinguishable__ letters. It's not just Greek. Sounds like you're mentioning the current Chinese phenomena. Where people have an easier time reading and it helps that it's text, including traditional characters. But typing can still be hard. Because that's the problem, that there's only so many easy to distinguish squiggles you can put on a keyboard. Because I'm sure while every key in distinguishable, you wouldn't want to operate a keyboard that looked like this [0] (it's actually a car decorated in keys, in case you want to see [1]).
There's a balance that that's hard to strike. The reason many languages use alphabets is not because the complexity of writing hieroglyphics, but because hieroglyphics even when written well can be difficult to distinguish and be cumbersome. There's probably no universal language (sorry Chomsky) so there's no symbols you can put on those keys that are universally recognizable. If you're actually interested in this kind of topic there's two things I suggest you look into. The first is Korean (specifically Hangul) [2] which has an interesting history relevant here and the other is long term nuclear storage [3,4]. The former was specifically designed to increase literacy and was extremely effective. The later is the difficulties of universal innate communications where we think certain things are absolutely obvious but aren't.
The other problem with languages is just usage. There's many over loaded words and it's not like we're at a shortage of combinations in the English language. Even combination of short words! The word cb doesn't exist, nor cbra! This alone should make someone suspicious that the depth of the problem is so much more than symbol complexity and combinatorics.
I'm sure Shannon would have something to say about the tyranny about encoding and complexity... Your suggesting is just the other end of the problem.
Claude Shannon had something to say about this as I recall.
> Do you have another suggestion? Because I don't see how code, English, or literally any other thing that can be written down is anything more meaningful than "a bunch of squiggles."
The difference is that the squiggles appear on your keyboard. If you use modern language to construct a variable name, the name can be suggestive of what it is to someone already fluent in natural language. Multi-character names also reduce collisions -- there are only so many Greek letters. And then the research paper doesn't show an inscrutable glyph as a JPEG that you can't even copy and paste into a search engine if you don't already know what it represents.