While I don't think anyone would object to precision being a good thing when it comes to papers, I would definitely object that readability is more important.
A paper is not source code - it is a tool for scientists to share their discoveries with fellow humans, and fellow humans will always appreciate clearly expressed ideas. After all, what good is a tool for knowledge sharing that's accessible only to a few? Now, I've argued before that some papers are necessarily difficult (because the topic is very specialized) and I stand by it. At the same time I do think a good paper should attempt to reach as wider an audience as possible, and jargon goes against this concept. I think the joke that "Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space" illustrates this concept beautifully.
For non-toy examples, there are notes freely available on Donald Knuth's "Mathematical Writing" course [1]. These notes are a must read for scientist, and they include several examples of how replacing jargon with plain English can do wonders to improve readability. Page 7, in particular, explains how to rewrite a proof that "is mathematically correct (except for a minor slip) but stylistically atrocious".
Many papers are source code in a way. In addition to communicating the results, you are communicating the process and details of analysis so that it can be replicated. This requires precision and often jargon.
To borrow your joke, please transform "homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space" into plain language with no loss of precision.
I really like your idea of working from the joke backwards, because I think it illustrates both of our points clearly.
On one hand, writing that into plain language would take forever. By the time I'm done, I would have probably written a small book on algebra. Here, the use of jargon is definitely precise. If you wanted to present this in a topology conference, where it might be important that the number of dimensions of the space is infinite, it would be probably a good start.
On the other hand, thousands of people use git everyday without understanding a single word of this description. But if I say instead "git is a distributed version-control system for tracking changes in source code during software development", my clarity has now skyrocketed. I definitely lost a lot of precision, but my readers will still be able to replicate my results.
That's not to say that there is no necessary jargon - my own definition uses "distributed version-control", which is absolutely key for understanding what's going on.
A paper is not source code - it is a tool for scientists to share their discoveries with fellow humans, and fellow humans will always appreciate clearly expressed ideas. After all, what good is a tool for knowledge sharing that's accessible only to a few? Now, I've argued before that some papers are necessarily difficult (because the topic is very specialized) and I stand by it. At the same time I do think a good paper should attempt to reach as wider an audience as possible, and jargon goes against this concept. I think the joke that "Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space" illustrates this concept beautifully.
For non-toy examples, there are notes freely available on Donald Knuth's "Mathematical Writing" course [1]. These notes are a must read for scientist, and they include several examples of how replacing jargon with plain English can do wonders to improve readability. Page 7, in particular, explains how to rewrite a proof that "is mathematically correct (except for a minor slip) but stylistically atrocious".
[1] http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematica...