Hi Scott. I don't exactly agree, because the terseness and lexical density of the C code are the same qualities as cause people to recoil from APL/J/K programs

Hi Scott. I don't exactly agree, because the terseness and lexical density of the C code are the same qualities as cause people to recoil from APL/J/K programs as well (http://www.nsl.com/k/s/s.k http://www.nsl.com/k/s/s.k). The implementation and language are cut from the same cloth. This of course is not always true (i.e. your point holds much better in the general case) - but it is true in this world, where program brevity and regularity are so highly prized. Let's note that the payoff for departing from the mainstream in this way is not small: these languages achieve abstractive (compositional) power and elegance without sacrificing efficiency. Those two things are incompatible in nearly every other programming context -- so much so that it's a truism that higher-level code is shorter but slower, lower-level code is faster but more verbose. Yet here they happily co-exist.