I'd recommend reading Iverson's "Notation as a Tool of Thought" (http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm) . Operator loo

I'd recommend reading Iverson's "Notation as a Tool of Thought" (http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm) . Operator looks for APL - and then for J - were modelled after mathematical notation, which had to be extended somewhat towards computations. But can you imagine writing on a whiteboard, say, "samples_transposed" instead of A'? You definitely can use words instead of many symbols in J. I highly doubt though you want to do that for the core language. Much more productive - IMO - is to learn the vocabulary - which is very finite. Yes, I know it's a great show stopper for those considering learning J.