[kbenson]

t may just be that the learning curve for APL is so steep and so long to become truly proficient that most don't get there. I've long held the opinion that much of the criticism of Perl as "line noise" is more to do with people that aren't really proficient in it thinking they are because a subset of the language is very C-like and familiar, and it can be used for quite a while before encountering anything too foreign to someone that knows C. Once that happens though, it leaves those people scratching their heads wondering what they are seeing.

Compare and contrast to APL and Lisp, which are obviously different, and Python, which avoids the problem by having a fairly different syntax and a guide for exactly how to do things.

I've seen some pretty amazing things in APL, but I can't really understand them. I don't count that against the language, I just haven't spent the time to actually learn APL.

As for there being an optimum, I think there is, but I think it has a lot to do with how long and for how complex of things you plan to use the language. Front-loading learning time for a more expressive language may pay dividends later.