The creator of APL also made an open source language called J that uses ascii characters (although there are some other important differences between APL and J)

The creator of APL also made an open source language called J that uses ascii characters (although there are some other important differences between APL and J). J has a pretty nice IDE which can do things like break down code into its constituent parts, which is also used for stepping through code as a debugger. That has really helped me to understand J code better. For learning the language, I've found the freely available "J Tutorial and Statistical Package"[0] to be a great approach. You learn J by building up a package of basic stats functions. The author also has a variety of other interesting J papers.[1] [0] https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~smillie/Jpage/jtsp.pdf https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~smillie/Jpage/jtsp.pdf [1] https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~smillie/Jpage/Jpage.html https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~smillie/Jpage/Jpage.html