By cleaner, do you mean more verbose? For example, the well known phrase for average in J is (average=: +/ % #). You would have no problem assigning names to the parts of the function, i.e. (sum=: +/), (divide=: %), (tally=: #) and defining the function as (average=: sum divide tally). It is tempting to learn J this way, but once you are familiar with the primitives, it makes more sense to just use them. You can pack a lot of thought into very few character, which is one of J's strengths.