Another example: APL used a bunch of mnemonic symbols for operators -- for example, the "reverse" operator is a circle with a vertical line through it. Mirror i

Another example: APL used a bunch of mnemonic symbols for operators -- for example, the "reverse" operator is a circle with a vertical line through it. Mirror image. This made sense back in 1962, with Mad Men-era Selectric typewriters* , but it never sat comfortably with ASCII. Very dense, expressive code. Like thinking in kanji, after a lifetime of alphabetic hackery. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectric http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectric The idea has many things going for it, and is worth another go in the era of touchpads and graphic interfaces. APL has always had a die-hard following, and intriguing ASCII offshoots such as J and K, but it's time for a second chance. The APLs have many other interesting aspects (they're all about data-parallelism and functional programming of a different flavor than Lisp and Haskell), but to my knowledge nobody has sincerely retried the glyph-based language thing again.