[cpressey]

I completely support anyone who wants to invent new notations for things. It's fun. But I'd just like to note that if logical, regular notation was necessarily better, we'd all be speaking Lojban and programming in Scheme. Also, I suspect a conventional eighth note would be easier to make out in a dim concert hall...

[Scaevolus]

Simplifying notation doesn't automatically make things better.

Theory: people prefer infix to prefix or suffix notation because it more closely mirrors the Subject-Verb-Object patterns of their native languages.

Corollary: lisp feels awkward because it doesn't map cleanly to native language thinking.

Lojban is mostly SVO as well.

[cpressey]

If that theory was correct, one might expect Forth to be really popular among Japanese speakers. I don't see a lot of evidence for that.

I tend to think it's a more general effect where humans actually want a certain amount of irregularity in their languages/notations, to act as markers or error-detecting codes of some sort. e.g. "he", but "him" in accusative case. But who knows; English gets by with "you" being both singular and plural...