there is, I think, a divide between programmers that is pretty basic. Do they need a language that maps somewhat to written human language, or can they adapt to languages that do do not at all resemble the human languages they are familiar with.

This divide is most probably cultural, programmers in Western societies often have pre-programming familiarity with English and thus they do not need to learn a language that does not match to how they understand languages to work (as might be the case with programmers from Asian countries or others where familiarity with English is not guaranteed)

So if your primary gateway to programming languages are ones that slightly resemble a human language you are familiar with you may have lots of psychological blocks keeping you from making that final jump to reasoning in J, or APL, or even a DSL like regular expressions.

Of course DSLs also have the problem that many programmers do not seem to fit well in things that do not have all the logical control operators they are used to, thus programmers who do not handle CSS, SQL or similar languages even though they are significantly simpler than a full featured programming language.

In short, things that are very different from what you are used to will probably be difficult to learn, use, and remember, and the same goes for most of your coworkers.

> as might be the case with programmers from Asian countries or others where familiarity with English is not guaranteed

Lots of Asian countries where familiarity with English is assumed in professional contexts.

> So if your primary gateway to programming languages are ones that slightly resemble a human language you are familiar with you may have lots of psychological blocks keeping you from making that final jump to reasoning in J, or APL, or even a DSL like regular expressions.

That raises the interesting possibility that J or APL might be more appealing to non-English speaking countries, or maybe where the dominant languages are not Indo-European (so not similar to English either). I wonder whether there is any evidence of this?

I think there's also a bit of Unix philosophy in there.

If you're using 5 different dsls to write a script, 1 more isn't really an issue. Now the fashion is for 1 big batteries included language, which requires you to know a lot of things itself, so that non regular (ha) DSL sticks out.

Theres probably an issue of many tools being much more powerful than the average case, so if you want you can write a re/bash/sed script that's impenetrable to the average programmer.

I don't know if the same is true for large individual languages? Could you take one element of c++ to the extreme to the point that it doesn't make sense to most c++ers?

Slightly tangential to your point, but I'm leaning towards programming languages no longer limiting themselves to ASCII. IOW, I'm leaning more towards APL than to J. I'm wondering how much of a blocker it's been to not embrace non-ASCII characters, or italic/bold/underlined formatting.