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I imagine that making user functions would require leaving the one-symbol-one-function spelling system that J programmers are accustomed to, and that spelling system is part of the appeal. Also, if the idiomatic form with primitives is shorter than the name, it's tough to consider the name an improvement. :)

Thanks for your response.

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Yeah, some things are so common and small as to not merit their own name except in a tutorial. It might be fun to try using those to construct really garden-pathy code. Stick the fork `+/%#` (average when used on its own) somewhere in a train, but use the dyadic case, or position it so that parsing splits it up.

I found that it quickly becomes a mess with tens of parens when you try to do this. Parsing rules of J are complex and the same sequence of symbols can be parsed in a couple of different ways depending on the context - it's good to keep expressions very short to avoid this.

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