J/APL has advantage of forcing you to think about the solution to
a problem in a completely orthogonal way to the usual programming
paradigms. In my experience the "re-expression" of an idea in a
second, very different form dramatically highlights the design
decisions made in the first form. Since the original authors are
no longer available we need to tease out the design decisions.
Unfortunately I'm unaware of any category or strongly typed work in J
so I don't think the idea carries much weight beyond the numerics. I
added a piecewise Gamma function to Axiom in February and have been
looking at the special functions since then. J seems to be a good fit
in this area, hence the original remark.