>To a J programmer, that's not just clear, it's obvious.
Is the argument that J just has really weird syntax? It feels trivial to me to make a mess of syntax that makes learning a language obtuse, unless there's something more fundamentally different about J, this is the first I'm hearing of it.
Their argument would be that J works differently, and once you internalize how it works, many hard problems become tractable. Their slogan is something like, "understand the problem, and it's done" -- meaning that once you understand the problem, the second step of translating the solution into code is near-trivial.
I would argue that's at least partially because J programmers are in general incredibly smart. (I don't count myself as a J programmer.)
Is the argument that J just has really weird syntax? It feels trivial to me to make a mess of syntax that makes learning a language obtuse, unless there's something more fundamentally different about J, this is the first I'm hearing of it.