Just like Chinese and English are different so APL and for instance C, ruby or Basic are different.
By defining symbols for operations more complex than just the basics APL has a learning curve but once you have gotten past that it is actually more readable than the alternative because you have less to hold in your head that does not actually help to solve the problem.
All that syntactical sugar and symbol stuff requires some expenditure of cycles and the cognitive load spent on that won't be available to solve the problem at hand.
That's where your definition of 'readable' is different from what the APL people consider 'readable'. They are talking about reading the problem, you are talking about being able to 'parse' the code into (re)representing the problem.
In APL the code is what it does. In most other languages you first have to figure out what it is before you can figure out what it does.
In essence difference between the word 'cat' and a picture of a cat or an ideogram representing 'cat' (assuming one exists), or even an actual cat.
By defining symbols for operations more complex than just the basics APL has a learning curve but once you have gotten past that it is actually more readable than the alternative because you have less to hold in your head that does not actually help to solve the problem.
All that syntactical sugar and symbol stuff requires some expenditure of cycles and the cognitive load spent on that won't be available to solve the problem at hand.
That's where your definition of 'readable' is different from what the APL people consider 'readable'. They are talking about reading the problem, you are talking about being able to 'parse' the code into (re)representing the problem.
In APL the code is what it does. In most other languages you first have to figure out what it is before you can figure out what it does.
In essence difference between the word 'cat' and a picture of a cat or an ideogram representing 'cat' (assuming one exists), or even an actual cat.