I think being extremely succinct is one of J strengths. You can trade it for better readability, of course, but you don't really have to. As I read somewhere, J is meant to be read with the help of J system. You have at least two ways of visualising how expressions are parsed and once you know this (and it can be a little hard to figure out yourself in more complex J expressions) you can just execute bits of the expression to see what they do. With practice you start to see idioms (there are many in J cookbook) which reduces the number of parts of expression you need to execute.<p>I like J because it forces me to think differently and I don't mind spending extra time on writing and (trying to) reading it. I imagine in the production setting it would matter more, so I'm not saying that the second version of sudoku solver in the article is somehow "wrong". I just wanted to note that it's not absolutely impossible to use J in it's succinct, tacit form, both for writing and reading.<p>Anyway, I'm very happy that J gets some attention. It's a great language!