> I'd be very surprised if your industry really did use complete pseudocode and only elided error handling. On the other hand, you're sort of assuming in your conclusion that pseudocode is the "better way" for languages because that's what people use, but you're leaving out the initial bias. I would argue that if you made current industrial languages more like pseudocode, you'd probably do better, yes, but it's a local maximum derived from an assumption of what the end result will be.

Error handling was one example - I see concerns like serialization, permissions, transactionality commonly elided, and I look for better ways to handle them in programming languages as well.

> I would argue that academia is relevant because it's one of the few places where the ideas are more important than the executable. If the ideas are communicated clearly, then you've succeeded.

Maybe. That assumes that the successful papers (and successful academics) are those that communicate ideas clearly. I'm not convinced.

> the reality is that if you take the machine away, and focus on human-to-human communication, without any "industrial" bias (expectation of machine execution), then rigorious idea communication is almost always pictorial, visual, and ideographic.

Not my experience at all - if anything I'd say visual aspects tend to be a marker of less rigorous communcation.

> Fruthermore, the notations that people develop and have developed over time to communicate ideas never end up looking like mainstream programming languages. As people work with ideas, math notation is the quintessential notation for communicating human ideas rigorously.

Mathematics is one such notation; "legalese" is another, and philosophical terminology a third. I'm wary of generalising too much from mathematical notation alone.