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APL (and I assume J) uses a large range of special graphic symbols as part of its syntax, which can be difficult to internalize for folks coming from other languages. It can be easily construed as mysterious or magical lettering (arcane rune). My favorite video to illustrate this is Conway's Game of Life written in APL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

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J and K stick to Ascii (though recent K seems to accept a unicode "sqrt" sign, and "pi" character with the expected meaning).

I do find some J choices questionable - e.g. '}' and '{' are used as individual operators, rather than a parenthetical pair - which confuses editors without a special J mode, and humans who switch between languages often - but if you use it enough, it's easy to get used to; Also, K keeps () {} and [] as parenthetical pairs, like they are in C/Java/Python etc

Unlike APL, J has an explicit goal of sticking only to ASCII symbols, but yeah, they're just as intimidating.

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