&gt; I know it from myself and don&#x27;t think I have to to provide evidence that by large most people work like this. Reading and interpreting text is just WAY more complex a process and thus much slower than associating a shape with a meaning.<p>I don&#x27;t think there is a difference in speed between reading &quot;sum&quot; and &quot;+&quot;. You don&#x27;t read the word &quot;sum&quot; letter by letter: you see it as a whole token and your brain recognizes it instantly.<p>&gt; For example, application designers have known for a long time that it&#x27;s important to build a symbolic language (icons etc) because that&#x27;s just way faster (once you have learned what the symbol means, for example with the help of a tooltip).<p>You&#x27;re talking GUI, which is different than writing and reading code. There are, for instance, much less GUI elements visible on the screen than there are identifiers even in a short snippet of code and there is much more context available for deduction in the code than in the GUI. I don&#x27;t think the two situations - recognizing GUI features and recognizing and understanding identifiers in the code - are comparable.