J is APL in ASCII. My first PC was a hand-me-down from a family member who had installed APL on it and put a bunch of stickers on the keyboard for typing all the strange characters.

Where I work, we have some production code in another APL-family language, q, which is the main interface to kdb - a remarkably fast time-series database in a remarkably tiny binary, with a remarkably expensive price tag.

I think APL and its kin disprove the "Blub Paradox." Here's a language that in certain aspects is far more powerful even than Lisp, and in others falls down on tasks that are trivially simple elsewhere. And that's fine. Horses for courses.

I recommend trying APL or K instead.

APL has weird symbols, so forces you to abandon any previous notions.

K is super minimalistic so easy to keep in mind.

But J is both huge and very different but uses e.g. brackets as individual characters (not in pairs) and other things that break your visual pattern matching. So it’s a lot more effort, IMO

After you have grokked it, if you like it - then, by all means do look at J. It is in many ways a purified APL albeit with ascii only characters, and a few decisions that look good on paper but less so in practice (like forks and trains)

I don’t write APL or K or J myself, but my C code (and some of my Python) is dramatically changed as a result of working with K in the past — it is dramatically simpler and faster, although less idiomatic for those languages.