[kick]

"the best syntax"

Yes, absolutely. By a long shot. For starters, J can actually be parsed. (k can also be parsed, for what it's worth.)

"Easiest to learn"?

Spend ten minutes using J's built-in Labs feature. Or read J for C Programmers (also ships with the language), if you come from a non-array background. Iverson was able to teach this stuff to public school children in no time at all; modern array languages seem to deliberately make themselves obtuse to outside observers. APL was doomed to obscurity because the people making it decided to please existing customers rather than try and make it approachable.

I don't know when you mean modern

Pretty much every APL2 feature and everything that came after it that they didn't borrow from J.

While J has English control statements, they generally aren't used, but nearly every time I come across something written in Dyalog APL it's full of :If :EndIf and all sorts of atrocious English words which mock the ideal of a better notation than ALGOL.

[mlochbaum]

> J can actually be parsed

Don't know where you got that one. J source can't even be tokenized except during execution!

  NB. Compute n from reading a file of something
  n : 0
    Is this the source of a function, or a string?
  )

Besides that, J has the same contextful issues as APL with regards to the value of variables determining how the syntax fits together. It's missing a few dark corners like niladic functions, but these are small differences; it's still fundamentally unparseable.

[rscho]

Regarding that, I am surprised that a 'more limited APL' lacking this ambiguity and opening the way to easy compilation never appeared (to my knowledge). I essentially use J for data wrangling and pretty much never use the metaprogramming features of the language (". and the like). An 'APL NumPy' would be quite nice, IMO.