Hieroglyphs are not necessarily less readable than words. It's good to be able to build mental state, and the more verbose a language is, the more you need to dance between parsing mode and building mental state. Context shifting is expensive. Paging around is particularly exhausting.

I spoke to one of the guys working on the K-language OS at a conference last week. He made the case that - once learnt - the grammar for K it is objectively simple to build mental state from compared to alternatives. I'm open to this being true.

I didn't know about Turbo Vision - that's great. And cross-platform too. Thanks!