In my experience the APL family of languages are extremely hostile to the kind of exploratory coding that people would do in e.g. Python, JS or even C.

You do APL like you do mathematics: sit down with pen & paper and think. And yes, many times it’s hit-n-miss, and someone walking by will tell you how it’s trivial with technique X you were unaware of. But again, this is how people do maths too: Maxwell’s original set of equations for electromagnetism were 20 differential equations, and it was later that Heaviside came by and rewrote it in its concise vector form we all know. (And those four equations can still be simplified to a single equation via geometric algebra! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_descriptions_of... )