It wouldn't work the same, that's for sure. And APL experience isn't enough to know, because you only see one side of the comparison! Here are some notes from t

It wouldn't work the same, that's for sure. And APL experience isn't enough to know, because you only see one side of the comparison! Here are some notes from that side. The advantage of using symbols for array operations is the same as the advantage in math of using them for arithmetic. A symbol can be read much faster than a word, and it makes syntax easier, not harder, to discern. This is because you only have to mentally group symbols into expressions instead of grouping characters into words and words into expressions. When programming with keywords you'd probably mitigate this by writing shorter lines in order to move some of the structure to a higher level. Keywords have the advantage that the ones the user writes aren't any different than the ones the language provides. This can be nice, although I find that distinguishing user-defined words from symbols can also be helpful: those words tend to give a good summary of what's going on, while the primitives around them just do all the data-shuffling detail work required to make it happen. So it's easier to ignore those details and quickly get the bigger picture.