I never did any real programming in APL, but I studied it over about 2 months. When you get used to the symbols, reading spelled-out words feels like reading in slow motion, or being stuck in molasses.

Most (not all) APL code I've seen uses very short names, often one letter names, for function names. And APL programmers are famous for cataloging "idiom" which are short phrases for common subroutines. In other words, it's best practice to repeat 3- or 4- symbol phrases instead of defining a subroutine.

Of course, there's nothing about an array language that requires using symbols; but for some reason most do.