You can ignore this, given that I haven't used either APL/J seriously, but if I were to truly dive in, I'd lean towards APL exactly because of its non-ascii/symbolic leanings. the only similitude I know of is operator overloading, and whenever that is used, I have to relearn what each operator does in a certain context. it is only if you use it regularly like regex which while changing the meaning of the operators, since its an entire DSL, is too different for me to think + means sum. If another entirely different symbol was introduced, then I'm not assigning any functionality to it, which is why I think it should be easier.