I understand that the compactness is a feature, and I don’t have any gripes with the symbolic notation personally, I just think a more verbose notation might av

I understand that the compactness is a feature, and I don’t have any gripes with the symbolic notation personally, I just think a more verbose notation might avoid turning people off too early. By starting from familiar territory, you can get people accustomed to a new style of thinking before switching to a more compact syntax. Lots of new programming languages borrow syntax from familiar mainstream languages in order to reduce friction for beginners and experts alike. Heck, as long as we’re on the subject, I’d take a symbolic notation that used small icons or emoji as a sort of middle ground—at least then they might be more mnemonic. For instance, there’s nothing about ↑ that suggests “take” to me, or ⍉ “transpose”, but I’d have a good guess at what these icons mean, and they could remain legible at fairly small sizes: ├───┤ ┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐ │A│A│B│B│B│B│ └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┘ ┌─┬─┬─┐ ┌─┬─┐ │A│A│A│ │A│B│ ├─┼─┼─┤ ├─┼─┤ │B│B│B│ │A│B│ └─┴─┴─┘ ├─┼─┤ │A│B│ └─┴─┘ (Where A and B are different colours/shades—shade characters don’t appear to work on HN.)