Terry Tao on some desirable properties of mathematical notation
Mathematical notation is great at facilitating formal manipulations. This is its critical feature, and without it we would get stuck at the level of ancient mathematics. This is the reason it was invented a few hundred years ago in the first place. That said, I find that notation is often abused in texts as a mere substitute for the normal human language which, while allowing to compress the text, does in fact nothing to help the reader better understand what is being said but rather looks like a crazy mess of characters and other marks in a multitude of fonts, styles and sizes the only purpose of which seems to be to cause an eye strain.