Man, you bring up so many good, juicy points. I wish we could sit down and chat about them!

First off, just to be clear, I totally understand the friction points you bring up. APL's learning curve is crazy steep, and learning materials beyond the beginner level are nigh on nonexistent. It sucks, I agree.

That said, if you're able to push through the abyss, I can assure you that most of that friction drops away. It's clear that you're still thinking in terms of individual primitive operations, but with familiarity thing like k v⌿⍨← will just read as atomic operations in the same way that you read "laser" not "l-a-s-e-r".

More than that, though, the if/else struggle you mention really brings back memories. In practice it's really not an issue. We just ⍪←∪ to insert potentially new keys, str←str[x←⍋str] ⋄ k v⊇←⊂x if a sort is needed, etc. But we only do those when the operations on the data demand it. Otherwise there's no point in encoding irrelevant extra structure in the data.

It took me a good couple years of regular APL hacking for things to click, but I'm not really sure how to get across the feeling, so you'll just have to believe me or not, I guess.