Nevermind the comment about it being slightly obfuscated. Have to realize that this is the creator of J we're talking about. He probably saw it as highly expressive code (much meaning in as few characters as possible). Though I can't agree, it is definitely amazing that something so small could be the start of something like J.
It was actually written by Arthur Whitney, the author of K (not J), though Roger Hui (of J) studied it beforehand.
I do recommend studying it, though. Their APL dialects are really something; I wish there were good fully open-source implementations, and writing one is on my queue. Kona (http://github.com/kevinlawler/kona), an open-source implementation of K 3.2, is also coming along.
Just be warned that APLer C is usually nasty, brutish, and short. :)
FWIW, the best thing I've seen for getting the J mindset is _J for C Programmers_ - as Henry Rich says, to do J you must "think big" - don't think "for each part of this list, do this, then this, then this...", think, "apply this operation over these.". That scales up to multiple dimensions, and can often be run in parallel. :)