Please stop telling others how they'll learn best.

No? Of course people learn in different ways, but it's the people have already learned in those different ways who are in a position to discuss the merits of those different ways (obviously taking into account the understanding that different things work for different people).

The people who haven't learned it and are complaining about how daunting it seems can certainly have opinions but their opinions aren't very useful and interesting.

The issue is that your comments have been full of presumption, which I personally find rude (in addition to being unuseful and uninteresting)

For example, it's not clear that you've considered that the people you're replying to have learned the subject matter and are reflecting on what would have made the process easier for them.

I did indeed presume the OP didn't know this stuff. For one thing: because in my experience it was pretty easy to pick up for everybody who took classes on it. (There are all kinds of notations that weren't, though; I just don't think was one of them.) On re-reading that presumption might not hold though. My mistake.

In general my reaction is a sort of counter-reaction to a HN pattern that I don't like. Every HN post has someone say "this is so stupid" on it, about something (all kinds of things usually). I really hate that. So my flinch response is to say "this objection is also stupid". Not helpful and just as bad as what I'm criticizing, really. I regret it.

Somewhat kooky afterthought: I don't like those initial critical nitpicky reactions because they sort of.. encode.... a rather unlikeable philosophy that is always in subtext here, which is that everything can be solved by building something, or doing something 'right', and regular human effort to solve human problems, with its human flaws, is worthy of scorn. Never cared for that. I think that's why I react negatively to it. Like in this case: those notations are actually good for a bunch of reasons. Strongly typing it? Try that for twenty minutes and you'll see why it's gonna be worse (I mean... probably. maybe I'm wrong! glad to learn). Or maybe every blog post define its terms more carefully for people who didn't learn from school? I dunno, I had a blog and tried that and it makes the posts crap, filled with meticulous definitions. At some point you just have to assume some things about your audience, and let them google what they don't know.