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'Betza's Funny Notation has its merits, but it also has its weak points.'

Well, yes. Why do you think I gave it that name?

My primary goal was to create a notation that would be easy to read and
that would be capable of describing many different pieces. In this
respect, of course the funny notation was a great success. It is now
almost a standard, and whatever notation is the next advance to supersede
my early attempts will probably contain some degree of backwards
compatibility.

I wanted as much as possible to avoid the use of all the strange
punctuations. This was because in my real-life career as a programmer for
3270 emulations used in hundreds of countries by tens of thousands of
users, I was intensely aware of the variations, not only in standard
'national ascii' but also in substandard mickeysoft code pages. I
eventually had to use square brackets [] but they often came out badly
because Hans's computer would treat them as dutch asciii mickeysoft
nonstandard code page.

My earlier notation, largely unpublished, used more squigglies and angles
and ^%$#!()*& stuff. 

The ultimate notation, that will be determined by international committees
sanctioned by the ISO (International Standards Organization) will of
course succeed at describing the most common pieces within the ASCII code
page, and the second tier of most common pieces within 8859-1. Unicode
will be exploited to carry the possibilities to their ultimate.

You cannot imagine that a work of this size could be conducted by a single
person. My funny notation was never intended to be the ultimate, merely a
necessary step along the way. I think that, as such, it has been a *great*
success.

Likewise, Chess with Different Armies. A hundred years from now, most
likely nobody will play chess without different armies, and very likely
nobofy will use the primitive armies that the long-dead Betza devised. (I
do hope to be remembered a bit.)
The golden age of chess variant development has only just begun.