&gt; Do you think the APL family can exist without the terse syntax? Are there any aspects of the language that just wouldn&#x27;t work well without it?<p>Considering the evolution of APL, yes.<p>Ken Iverson was teaching math in Harvard, when he was growing the - mathematical - notation to describe the subject formally. It was happening in late 1950&#x27;s, and the computers were entering our life. At some point it became reasonable to use that evolved notation as A Programming Language - or APL, for short.<p>However, the idea was to make understanding easier - all along! Same idea which Alan Kay is pursuing with his works, same idea with many good technologies, when they are young - Java, JavaScript... Importance of notation - be it in math, or in formal-and-executable-math is the ideology of early APL. Now they say &quot;it&#x27;s hard to beat expressiveness of a whiteboard&quot;, but still attempt to use, say, an integral sign (and, similarly, one-letter variables), as one would do when showing the idea on a whiteboard. The history of hand-written math preferred terse notation - and that is carried on in APL as executable math.<p>So... yes, terseness is important, and APLers will also say that choice of symbols is important too. It&#x27;s only to beginners that they feel strange - pretty soon programmer learns them, gets used to them and refuses to substitute them with more readable longer variants - even though that would make certain things better. You don&#x27;t name variables on a whiteboard with long_names or camelCase - at best you use sub- and superscripts. Granted, you can have cups and power towers and other things, and they were really impractical with 1960&#x27;s level technologies... yet at least you have a singular text direction for expressions, in editors or in print.<p>J makes certain things more logical, and switches to ASCII. May be we&#x27;ll invent even better notation (to me, this - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matt.might.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;discrete-math-and-code&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matt.might.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;discrete-math-and-code&#x2F;</a> - looks like a good start to think about basic building blocks), but so far, we have APL family languages as arguably closest thing to math notation. To some, it&#x27;s the closest way they can imagine between making a solution in the head and explaining that to computer.