Really? It's like reading Chinese, but if it only had about fifty kanji and a perfectly regular grammar.

I'll grant you that it's pretty intimidating when you start, though.

Apl looks pretty tough, though I would love to learn it.

I know how to read persian/farsi, which I studied one course in at the university, I did not find it hard to learn to read that at all. Arabic is a little bit harder because there's more guesswork involved, but I don't know arabic. It's not the script, it's the way it's encoded imho, very few wovels are written down.

If you're interested in APL, I'd suggest checking out J (http://jsoftware.com/), a modern and free (though not open source) dialect, which only uses ascii. _J for C Programmers_ is pretty good. K, another APL dialect, is also quite amazing, but less free than J. (It's most recent version is called Q.)

I don't know Farsi or Arabic, though. I studied Spanish and German in college, but majored in history rather than linguistics.

(There's a conspiracy to make cool programming languages hard to google.)