One analogy I like to tell people who are overcome with shock and horror at APL-family languages is to compare it to someone used to Latin-family human languages looking at something like Chinese for the first time --- it's likewise totally "unreadable" at first glance, but then you realise that over a billion people can read and write that language fluently every day, many of which may also struggle with a Latin-family language as they've never seen one before.

I'm not convinced that APL is "incredibly hard to scan" for someone who is familiar with it; it's just a matter of experience. While I'm by no means experienced in APL either, a visually similar thing I did frequently in my younger days was reading x86 instructions not in a disassembler nor hexdump, but displayed as CP437. It was not hard, and I can still remember ┤, PQRS, ═!, and ├ as "MOV AH", "PUSH AX; PUSH CX; PUSH DX; PUSH BX", "INT 21", and "RET" respectively. Here's an example:

    ò║•═!├Hello world!$

Edit: looks like HN swallowed a byte, but you can sort of see what I mean.