People definitely could stand to write a lot more comments in their code. And like... yea, textbook style prose, not just re-stating the code in slightly less logical wording.

As somebody that occasionally studies pure math books those can be very, very light on regular English.

Textbooks aren't just communicating theorems and proofs (which are often just written in formal symbolic language), but also the language required to teach these concepts, why these are important, how these could be used and sometimes even the story behind the discovery of fields.

So this is far from an accurate comparison.

Yes, plain language text to support and translate symbology to concepts facilitates initial comprehension. It's like two ends of a connection negotiating protocols: once agreed upon, communication proceeds using only symbols.