It's not just identifiers though, it's also operators. To take an example from the OP article, I can't relate to anyone who claims that ∛x is better than cbrt(x). The fact that this is not only allowed but actively encouraged is absolutely baffling to me.

The language of science is mathematics, so code that more closely resembles mathematical notation can be more efficient for practicing scientists to understand. There's a lot of value in code that looks like the expression published in the paper, because when another scientist wants to build upon or modify that code, they'll read and understand the paper first, not the package code.

Also in physics, sometimes you get really large expressions with a lot of Greek letters and operators. In the paper, you make it a double-wide multiline equation with LaTeX. It makes a big difference if that corresponds to a few lines of Greek symbols in your code, and not twenty.

> I can't relate to anyone who claims that ∛x is better than cbrt(x)

I do. It's a simple \cbrt<tab> away in any editor worth their salt, and it greatly improves readability of computation-heavy code – ∛(ϵ² + ξ³) ≤ Φ(π) is much clearer than the ASCII equivalent.

Eh, I have to diagree on that. A mathematician reading ∛x in code will immediately know what it means, but that isn't necessarily true when seeing cbrt(x). Julia was written for mathematicians, not programmers, and takes some getting used to.

The mathematician still has to type \cbrt + tab to type the glyph so they have to know the name of the function. Not only that, they have to know the name of the function from reading the Unicode glyph or be constantly pasting characters into the REPL. I don't get how that's more efficient in any way.

We are in the age of Unicode. The LaTeX entry methods are options, not required. I rarely use them, and don’t paste in characters. I hit a modifier key. Typing a Greek letter is no more inconvenient than typing an uppercase letter.