Also, another argument for this notation, is that you condense patterns to be very close to one another. Notice in Java and C# when you start using language fea

Also, another argument for this notation, is that you condense patterns to be very close to one another. Notice in Java and C# when you start using language features that support something like 'fluent' notation where you just append operators and the data 'flows' through. Eventually you'll start seeing obvious improvements, for instance a 'map' followed by a 'concat' might be better off as a 'collect'. APL and J focus on the idea of making very high level things accessible with symbols, and since the underlying structure is always an array, it's easier to judge what things are doing and when the operations can combine. What's more, once you combine them, you give clues to the compiler about your intent, and often further optimizations can be done. It reminds me a bit of SQL Databases, in that the more indexes and constraints you add, the more the query execution can draw from to change the route a calc takes in order to try and do it more efficiently.