You're maintaining 5000 lines of J code huh? Sounds like a decent sized project. If you are spending 5-10 hours every week or two maintaining it, why not have a go at replacing it with something you do know? I would love to know how it went.
As for your other throwaway comments, any code, in any language is hard to read and maintain when you don't know what you are looking at. Or, as better stated by Whitehead (whose quote led off this thread), "Of course, nothing is more incomprehensible than a symbolism which we do not understand.".
Concerning the community you "hate" for some small-minded reason, my experience has been quite the opposite, I have not found a more informed, helpful or friendly group anywhere, and this also includes the APL/k/q/A+/NARS/SAC communities (all languages designed or influenced by Iverson).
As for pragmatism, Iverson was probably one of the most pragmatic language designers in history. Don't take my word for it though, here is what Dr. Fred Brooks has to say:
I once asked Kenneth Iverson, Turing Award winner and inventor of the APL programming language, "Why is APL so easy to use?" His answer spoke volumes: "It does what you expect it to do." APL epitomizes consistency, illustrating in detail orthogonality, propriety, and generality. It also epitomizes parsimony, providing many functions with few concepts. - Fred Brooks, "The Design of Design" page 72
At the bottom of the page, there are the following instructions: The text requires the APL385 Unicode font, which can be downloaded from https://sites.google.com/site/baavector/fonts .
Have you ever used J or APL seriously? If yes, what do you find so "crappy" about the notations? If no, please keep your uninformed opinion to yourself, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Sum in J is +/ not, $&$%^%$%M. Is +/ really too hard to comprehend? I agree with you that APL is historically important, but J is Ken Iverson's last and greatest gift to the programming community. He used the 26 years between the release of APL and J to address many of the shortcomings of APL. Take a look at http://bit.ly/hMmGWV for some background.
By cleaner, do you mean more verbose? For example, the well known phrase for average in J is (average=: +/ % #). You would have no problem assigning names to the parts of the function, i.e. (sum=: +/), (divide=: %), (tally=: #) and defining the function as (average=: sum divide tally). It is tempting to learn J this way, but once you are familiar with the primitives, it makes more sense to just use them. You can pack a lot of thought into very few character, which is one of J's strengths.