I just intuitively understood that symbols can have different meanings in different contexts, so never felt any dissonance or had any trouble understanding it. Like "read" has different pronunciations, or "plane" has different meanings, "=" is just multiple things under different contexts.
I agree in that this doesn't really take conscious thought anymore. However, the article had the following:
> How can a = a + 1? That’s like saying 1 = 2.
It looks like a lot of us don't have (never had?) trouble accepting a statement like `a = a + 1` and, upon stepping back, thought maybe it had to do with our internal dialog (which is now probably intuition as we've been processing statements like this for so long).
