Most of the time when I see a J programmer &quot;read&quot; some J code, it really means taking the spec and slowly, incrementally building up towards the same solution as the code they were handed. I have not seen them have much success at &quot;reading&quot; more than a couple lines of idiomatic code without being told what it does. I doubt it would scale up beyond a few lines of code (≈ a few &quot;paragraphs&quot; of code in Blub), having seeing a veteran mistake some quartic-time code for the Floyd-Warshall algorithm (which is cubic time).<p>I have not found this definition of &quot;read&quot; to be common in other language communities.