Therefore my comparison with mathematical notation. It can be used to write beautiful things, but the reader needs to have some knowledge to understand it and appreciate its beauty. Most importantly though, the density/opaqueness of the notation is what allows it to lift powerful ideas - to express in few lines what would otherwise take many pages.
It's not brevity for brevity's sake - it's understanding the limits of human working memory. The more verbose a description gets, the harder it is to work with it, until at some point, you just can't process it at all (at this point people start making indexes or developing notation to... make things more concise).
Comparing APL with Brainfuck is just ridiculous. The former is designed to be dense to enable efficient work; the latter is a joke that's designed to be sparse.
> Comparing APL with Brainfuck is just ridiculous.
What ever do you mean? The comparison in the first comment (which I did not write) is apt. They both use a notation of symbols that are derived from Western notation. There was no further comparison with Brainfuck made.
In that comment, APL was further compared with Perl, which perhaps is what you meant to write? Perl's 'write-only' nature largely stems from its ingrained use of regular expressions. There are, indeed, some parallels between regular expressions and APL, both utilizing some kind of notation to concisely describe function.
On that note, regular expressions were the first programming language I ever learned and I feel I have a good handle on them. I still find no joy in reading them. It's simply not a good language to read, even if it can benefit on the write side. I'm not convinced that knowledge and experience makes something more enjoyable. There are a lot of things in life that I have plenty of knowledge and experience in that doesn't translate to enjoyment.
It's not brevity for brevity's sake - it's understanding the limits of human working memory. The more verbose a description gets, the harder it is to work with it, until at some point, you just can't process it at all (at this point people start making indexes or developing notation to... make things more concise).
Comparing APL with Brainfuck is just ridiculous. The former is designed to be dense to enable efficient work; the latter is a joke that's designed to be sparse.