It's more about expressiveness and the ability to stay at a "high level" than actually the ability to just do some computation that is really hard elsewhere. A

It's more about expressiveness and the ability to stay at a "high level" than actually the ability to just do some computation that is really hard elsewhere. After all, most programming languages can do "the same stuff" - but no one would compare Haskell to PHP. In most of the examples in the article, the author is using just one or two verbs put together. Imagine if all of the verbs in your language worked seamlessly at the "concept" level, rather than the "write the loop" level. Even functional constructs like map/filter/reduce take up a lot of words. One or two characters can do the same thing, and be read faster and more idiomatically by an astute practitioner. That's my take on it (as an on and off Q/Kdb user, not a J dude -- yet..)