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When I joined the ranks of APL instructors years ago it was well known that students learned APL faster if they had not been exposed to other programming languages. (Iverson always warned against confusing unfamiliar and difficult.)
Back in the day, we supposed that evidence of the superiority of Iversons notation. Other languages were rubbish; one day all software would be written in APL.
Nowadays we know better. (I have written an application GUI in APL. I intend it to remain a once-in-a-lifetime experience.) We need to be polyglots. Nothing bad in that: humans have been polyglots since the Old Stone Age. (Only in recent centuries have linguistic communities grown large enough to host monoglots.)
Which leaves us with the barrier of the unfamiliar. Q widened access to kdb+ by letting users exploit their knowledge of SQL. KX Insights is doing more by providing access through Python and Web UI. But for those who need to write in q there remains the transition from what (in a recent ArrayCast episode) Joel Kaplan called the one-potato-two-potato approach to what shall we call it vector thinking?
A recent article in the RSA Journal on lifelong education stresses the challenge of unlearning as part of learning new skills.
What helped you learn vector thinking?
Last year I led an online workshop on vector thinking. We explored vector solutions in q to a small but non-trivial problem. Participants found it helped them, and I promised to hold another one. Perhaps its time? (Respond here to encourage me.)