[anyfoo]

As APL shows, you then need quite a large alphabet of symbols, though.

But I'm not strongly in either camp. A few common branches of mathematics taken together have quite a large alphabet of symbols, too, and we work well with it. It feels like symbolic notations can seem obtuse at first and be hard to get into, but once you're used to it the alternative may appear worse.

[neolog]

> As APL shows, you then need quite a large alphabet of symbols, though.

I count 71, which doesn't seem like a lot.

[still_grokking]

That's more than key-words in most languages, I think.

[scns]

Quick'n'dirty wetware lookup:

Go: < 30

C: ~ 31

C++: > 70

[neolog]

Python builtins (not even keywords): 68