TL;DR: They do not look readable to you because they are a "foreign language" you are unfamiliar with, much like Japanese is to most westerners. The vast major

TL;DR: They do not look readable to you because they are a "foreign language" you are unfamiliar with, much like Japanese is to most westerners. The vast majority of languages are essentially minor syntax "skins" applied to the same underlying Algol ideas; This describes C, Pascal, Python, Ruby, Perl, Java and most other languages - which is why being proficient in one lets you read others. Haskell, Ocaml are close enough to read, but usually not write, unless you are specifically proficient in one of them. APL (and J and K and likely Hobbes) are very different, both in concept and syntax -- to the point that you actually have to know one of them to be able to read any of them. They look intimidating at first, and they often take longer (per character / per line) to read even when you do know them, but they are very orthogonal; e.g. in K, the expression |/0(0|+)\x efficiently computes the maximum subarray sum of the array x; this is not a predefined program - rather, each character here carries a meaning, and all combined they solve the mss problem. If you looked at Japanese[1], it would look unreadable to you, but that's not because there's a problem with Japanese. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_subarray_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_subarray_problem [1] Pick any language you do not know with a character set you don't know - Japanese, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Thai ...