> In what other ecosystem would a top package introduce itself using an eight-variable equation?

That's the objective function of Hastie et al's GLM. I had a good chuckle when I realized the author's last name is Tibshirani. If you know you know.

And if I don't know, can I know?

Hastie and Tibshirani wrote a famous book on ML (https://hastie.su.domains/ElemStatLearn/), and extended GLMs into GAMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_additive_model

Peeved that it isn't an equation. There's no equals signs!

I'm the author. Thanks for the copy-edit, I should have indeed said "expression".

Objective function or expression might have been more precise, indeed.

Robert Tibshirani has a daughter named Julie.