I 100% agree, I think the functional features that have been added across all the popular languages (map, reduce, fold etc.) has been a positive. Nothing demonstrates it better (imo) than purrr in R: https://github.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/blob/main/purrr.pdf
I also think there is some merit to “high syntactical density” clearly if you can see the entire code in one place instead of having to navigate through many files or sections that’s beneficial. (Heavily discussed in the last big HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981639)
I also think JQ has proven the merit of tacit functional languages in that you can concisely write arbitrary transforms/queries on json that can be more expressive than SQL (many SQL engines have added JSONPath anyway). And I also think postfix is great for processing pipelines.
But I am not totally convinced in the approach of APL/J/Q/KDB for the combination of terse style + prefix + tacit because it makes the code so difficult to read. I think if you took an approach similar to JQ where instead of relying on symbols operators were just human readable words it would be easier to get us half way there to trying out the verb, adverbs etc. approach of the APL family. The problem with making it human readable text is that you lose the conciseness which is part of the draw of the APL family as they want to have a high syntax density and analogous code to mathematical expressions.
I also think there is some merit to “high syntactical density” clearly if you can see the entire code in one place instead of having to navigate through many files or sections that’s beneficial. (Heavily discussed in the last big HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981639)
I also think JQ has proven the merit of tacit functional languages in that you can concisely write arbitrary transforms/queries on json that can be more expressive than SQL (many SQL engines have added JSONPath anyway). And I also think postfix is great for processing pipelines.
But I am not totally convinced in the approach of APL/J/Q/KDB for the combination of terse style + prefix + tacit because it makes the code so difficult to read. I think if you took an approach similar to JQ where instead of relying on symbols operators were just human readable words it would be easier to get us half way there to trying out the verb, adverbs etc. approach of the APL family. The problem with making it human readable text is that you lose the conciseness which is part of the draw of the APL family as they want to have a high syntax density and analogous code to mathematical expressions.