Comment by quotemstr

The vibe I get from q/kdb in general is that its concision has passed the point of increasing clarity through brevity and is now about some kind of weird hazing or machismo thing. I've never seen even numpy's verbosity be an actual impediment to understanding an algorithm, so we're left speculation about social and psychological explanations for why someone would write (2#x)#1,x#0 and think it beautiful.

Some brief notations make sense. Consider, say, einsum: "ij->ji" elegantly expresses a whole operation in a way that exposes the underlying symmetry of the domain. I don't think q's line noise style (or APL for that matter) is similarly exposing any deeper structure.