Very long time ago I heard that C is completely unreadable[1]. I went and learnt it some time later and discovered that it was bullshit. Then I heard that C++ is unreadable[2] (I mean the source, not error messages...). I went and learned it and realized this, too, was bullshit. Another couple of years forward and I heard that it's impossible to read PHP code[3]. So I learned PHP (and started earning money thanks to it) and realised that "impossible is just a word". I then heard that indentation delimited blocks in Python make the code impossible to edit (and unreadable, btw)[4]. I learned it and realized that it's rather easy to configure your editor and make this non-issue. Around that time I heard that PERL is a write-only language[5]. I wanted to check, so I went and learned PERL. It took some time, but eventually I realized that, indeed, it's possible to read PERL. To make the rest of the story short: around that time, I decided I want to go polyglot and started researching various niche languages, like Lisp, Forth, Prolog, J, Factor, Avail, Haskell, Erlang and so on. I heard (mostly) that I'm insane and that it's impossible to either read or write any such language[1][2][3][4][5]. As you probably guessed already I went and learned most of them and realized that - shocking! - it is possible to both read and write all of them!
Now, I don't know either K or Q, but I have a very, very, very hard time believing that they are too terse and unreadable because of that.
From my experience, the "improvements in readability" are of course good, but they only shorten the time to master the language. Once you learn the language well enough, it becomes readable. And the very few syntactic issues which are objectively hard to distinguish/are confusing the eye, etc. tend to be worked around with formatting and font settings.
Written Japanese is totally impossible to read if you don't know it - and it takes reasonably longer to learn it. However, once you know it, it's readable. A Japanese person reading a newspaper in Japanese uses as much effort as me reading a newspaper in my native language.
[1] From Pascal and later Delphi users.
[2] From C users.
[3] From PERL users.
[4] From PHP users.
[5] From Python users.
Most of the time when I see a J programmer "read" some J code, it really means taking the spec and slowly, incrementally building up towards the same solution as the code they were handed. I have not seen them have much success at "reading" more than a couple lines of idiomatic code without being told what it does. I doubt it would scale up beyond a few lines of code (≈ a few "paragraphs" of code in Blub), having seeing a veteran mistake some quartic-time code for the Floyd-Warshall algorithm (which is cubic time).
I have not found this definition of "read" to be common in other language communities.
Now, I don't know either K or Q, but I have a very, very, very hard time believing that they are too terse and unreadable because of that.
From my experience, the "improvements in readability" are of course good, but they only shorten the time to master the language. Once you learn the language well enough, it becomes readable. And the very few syntactic issues which are objectively hard to distinguish/are confusing the eye, etc. tend to be worked around with formatting and font settings.
Written Japanese is totally impossible to read if you don't know it - and it takes reasonably longer to learn it. However, once you know it, it's readable. A Japanese person reading a newspaper in Japanese uses as much effort as me reading a newspaper in my native language.