Every summer we spend about a week training interns with K, and they proceed to read, modify and write real production code with it during their tenure. Interns come from a mix of backgrounds- computer science, various engineering degrees, etc. This seems compelling evidence that K is learnable.
If you find K unreadable, consider spending a week or two seriously working with it. You might be surprised how you feel afterwards.
Right, but the one follows from the other.
I'm passingly familiar with K, Q, and a+. I've worked with Borror and I kind of own an a+ compiler. I think if you define "readable" to mean "you can learn it with two weeks intensive tuition" the fine, yeah, it's readable. But to me, lightning-fast speed doesn't make up for terse-to-the-point-of-dumb syntax.
+/&~&/(!1000)!/:3 5
No, but I also don't find myself wishing the entire project read like regex does. "If only our entire suite of enterprise software was made up of regexes..."
Some time ago I built an environment for livecoding graphics experiments with K, and the concision of the syntax makes it delightfully easy to experiment and make changes as I build up programs piece by piece. Here's a recording I made which illustrates all the intermediate steps of a simple way to draw a Voronoi diagram:
https://i.imgur.com/YZkYyDs.gif
K notation is a powerful medium of communication when I'm whiteboarding ideas with coworkers, scribbling on a napkin, or tapping an idea into my phone on the subway. I don't write K because I think doing so paints me as some sort of Ubermensch, I write K because I find it crisp and beautiful; An elegant K solution to a thorny problem is poetically satisfying!
I use k/q on and off and after a couple of weeks away, you basically need to relearn it. The massive advantage of R and Python is even after time away, it’s still perfectly legible.