J was what Iverson did after APL. ('arcfide has called it a "stopgap," but I don't think that's right: it does a lot of things better than even Dyalog does.) In that way, it's a bit more pure of an experience [compared to Dyalog APL], and in a way brings the notation a lot further, as long as you can ignore the ASCIIfication of it.
k was made explicitly as a stripped-down version of (primitive-)APL. This has many trade-offs. It does make performance optimizations a lot easier (which is partially why practically every non-toy k implementation is faster than Dyalog, which is fast in its own right, even if J is usually faster). It's also mildly easier to keep in one's head in most cases.
It's a lot more mainstream in comparison to J, both because of the performance optimizations and because it's a lot less of a leap from Lisp to k than it is from Lisp to J. If I remember correctly, Arthur is a bit more of a normal person on this: he prefers/preferred writing Lisp to APL, and k is definitely a lot easier to compare to conventional languages than J or APL.
J was designed as a way to spread notation to the masses, k was designed as a way to get incredibly small amounts of code to do very big things. Both are good at both, I think, though to varying degrees.
k, though, appeals to a core aspect of the programmer by design: small. And it's small in a way that can't be called code golfing, either, which is like cocaine to your average programmer. It's primitive, very shiny, and its bite-sizedness appeals to your average cascade of attention-deficit (mostly grown-up now) teenagers that make up these sort of spaces. It's basically bait, and in a really good way.
Another reason is because J doesn't have all of the cool little snippets that k people love posting; there's no "ray-tracer in 7 lines of J" text dump despite something similar being possible, just because of the community that's formed around k. In k you have a bunch of people like Stevan Apter who just live for cool programming languages. They devour that stuff and try and make the coolest things they can to show everyone.
I wish I had a contextualized summary like this a few months ago when I first started to look into APL/j/k/q. Had a similar feeling when I first looked into Lisp and stumbled through the overwhelming amount of implementations and nuggets of information spread around the web & mailing list archives. Comments like yours really help (kinda like when you're lost in an RPG and after wandering around for a while & feeling lost you bump into this NPC who has the information you need to get further).
bookmarked
Have you read any of the essays/papers/anecdotes on jsoftware.com yet? They expand a lot on the history of APL, and it's pretty fascinating.
A fun quote that highlights how many years ahead APL and the companies built around APL were/are even decades later:
Working at IPSA, with its far-flung offices and its Mailbox, it was possible to “know” a person for years without ever meeting the person. Well into my IPSA career, I asked Lib Gibson, “Is Leslie Goldsmith a guy or a girl?”
https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLQA.htm
(IPSA was I.P. Sharp Associates, which long before that ran a huge amount of the APL in the world, remotely. Kind of like a primitive cloud, though then called time-sharing.)
The whole site http://nsl.com have some amazing code samples.
nsl stands for No Stinkin Loops - a reference to apl/k's implicit looping constructs.
(I miss using K)
The monadic/dyadic overloading in all these langs doesn't always help either. I recall somebody here recently writing a K implementation where there was explicit syntax for the uh... adicity(?) of operators, but I forgot to bookmark it. Anybody know what I'm talking about?
> [the] `:` in `|:` is used to force the verb `|` to be interpreted as a monad, as by default ambiguities are resolved in favour of dyads.
> Klong is an array language, like K, but without the ambiguity. If you know K or APL, you may be disappointed by Klong. If you don't know any array languages, it might explode your brain. Use at your own risk!
?
I've heard it said that J is for people with brains too big for K. J can be difficult with its hooks, forks, trains, and other complex function application constructs.
Job prospects too. K is heavily used in the financial sector (even YC has postings for K jobs in its monthly listings) and pays extremely well for what is basically a database developer.