Nobody wants to write proofs as English prose like they did when first proving basic algebraic properties. Yet those proofs are much easier to guess at the meaning of, even if you don't fully get it, than using our standard mathematical notation. Of course, it just so happens that our mathematical notation allows middle schoolers and high schoolers to think of these proofs as obvious and trivial, whereas they would have no idea what to make of the English proofs that are more "natural" to the English speaker. Of course, that notation that they use with such facility (even if they aren't particularly competent with it and just learned it last week) has no relation and no intuition at all to the English language, and makes no attempt to do so.

Yet, I challenge you to back up your statement about character counting by showing me a Computer Scientist and a Software Engineer who no longer writes or uses traditional mathematical notation for anything, but has systematically moved over to the more intuitive and natural programming language of their choice, such as Scheme, C, or Haskell.

APL is a suitable replacement for Mathematical notation and was designed as such. Other programming languages are not. That's a very important element.

It's not about character counting. See Iverson's Notation as a Tool of Thought Turing Award lecture.

You might have a stronger case if, since the advent of computing programming languages, which are demonstrably capable of representing a whole host of mathematical ideas and concepts directly, people have begun flocking to programming languages to replace their mathematical notation in the communication of ideas in non-computer science contexts.

However, people rarely consider a programming language equivalent to be better/superior to traditional mathematical notation when they are talking amongst themselves in front of a whiteboard.