I program, and am also presently working my way through some math books. I find that I often have to backtrack to look up pieces of notation like variables and operators. Unfortunately, this is very problematic. Greek and Latin letters give no indication of where they came from and are not usable search terms, even knowing the full context in which they appeared. Many authors have their own bits of idiosyncratic notation, often combinations of subscripting and line art generated by TeX macros. Since expanding equations out to their definitions is so difficult, I sometimes don't bother to investigate when one looks odd, which as you might expect leads to big trouble later when errors in understanding creep by.
This is not nearly as big a problem for me when reading code, however, because there every variable and nonstandard operator has a descriptive name wherever it's used, and documentation is never more than a few hotkeys away. The same thing could be done for math. Suppose you took a typical higher math book, and replaced every single-letter variable and operator with an appropriate identifier. For me, this would make it much more readable; I would gain a better understanding in less time. However, I don't know the effect size or how broadly this generalizes.
Do other people have this problem? Might this issue deter some people from studying math entirely? Has anyone tried the obvious controlled experiment? How about with an experimental group specifically of programmers?
Even worse than trying to search for single-letter variables that are defined somewhere in a mathematical text is trying to find the definitions of operators, if all you know is the squiggle used to denote that operator. For example, integrals are denoted by a slide-looking squiggle, so if you see one and don't know it's called an "integral", you can't look up what it means. If you do find a definition, the Wikipedia page you'll get describes integrals as "the signed area of region bound by (the function parameter's) graph", with a full-page of explanation and links to 5 or 6 pages of supplementary explanation. Good luck translating that into code!
What you won't find is the 5-line program that shows you how to actually calculate an integral (for that, see this page from SICP). Mathematicians descend into maddening vaguery when trying to describe concepts that could easily be described by a very short computer program, because math notation (and therefore mathematical study itself) lacks an equivalent of the for loop. So instead, mathematicians think they're describing something so fundamental that it's ineffable-- Integrals, man! Integrals! Either you grok it, or you don't.