With all due respect to Mr. Iverson, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at an international APL conference many moons ago, I think J went in the wrong direction.
Part of the power of APL is in the symbolic representation of concepts. The symbols are important. They form a language in more than one sense. Replacing them with ASCII/unicode equivalents rips the guts out of the language.
Here's a thought experiment: Take mathematic expressions and replace every symbol with two or three character ASCII (or whatever) equivalents. The integral symbol might become "integ"; the root symbol become "root"; first, second and third derivative periods become "der1", "der2" and "der3"; and so on. What have you accomplished? Well, at the very least you've ruined the superbly expressive nature of mathematics through agreed upon special symbols.
One could do the same with music and the results would be exactly the same.
In general terms, I believe that we don't need to go in that direction. We need to search for and find the programming equivalent of music and math notation.
If you've ever looked at some VHDL code you have seen an example of just how ugly this can get. Whenever I do FPGA work I use Verilog, which feels very much like C.
Defining a register in Verilog looks something like this:
reg [0:7] my_register;
In VHDL:
my_register: std_logic_vector(7 downto 0);
It's been a while since I touched VHDL so this example could be off. I don't remember if you have to add IN, OUT or INOUT to the declaration.
The point though is that one (Verilog) is compact and to the point whereas the other (VHDL) beats the crap out of you with unnecessary verbosity. My definition of "unnecessary" is that, if the exact same result can be had without the extra stuff then there is absolutely no reason for it to exist. The entire VHDL language is like that, this is just one example. If I remember correctly, there was one thing that was nice about VHDL way-back-when which had to do with parametric generation of code. Later Verilog implementations added these capabilities without making you feel that you were typing a novel.
The long post is to say that notation is important. It is a tool for thought as much as it provides expressive power. J, in my humble opinion, went the wrong way.