This seems similar to how Unix commands have both short and long names for flags. Single-character flags are easier to type, but also easier to mistype or misread since there is less redundancy.
It seems like K would be a particularly suitable language for having more than one syntax. The short syntax, once you get used to it, would be better for keyboard input and expert whiteboard discussions, but it might also be nice if there were also a standard syntax that was longer and closer to what most people expect? An editor could automatically translate between short and long syntax, and this would be helpful for making sure you typed what you think you did.
I think that's part of the theory behind q, which trades the monadic (unary) definition of operators for names, so: +: becomes flip, =: becomes group; ?: becomes distinct, and so on. I'm not convinced though, because Python+numpy has most of these operations (and those it doesn't aren't particularly difficult to implement), so it seems reasonable you could implement an environment almost as good as q[1].
But whilst the k/q operators are certainly useful, the Key thing is the notation. The notation is really valuable, and it seems hard to get it until you understand the notation well enough that it starts changing how you think about programming: numpy.matmul(x,y) might do the same thing that x+.y does, but the latter suggests more. I recommend reading Iverson's paper[2] on the subject, although you might find reading §5.2 before the beginning to be helpful in putting into context what exactly is meant by notation here.
[1]: There's a lot missing still. Good tables, efficient on-disk representation of data, IPC, views, and others-- all of which will be hard to do in Python without limiting yourself to a subset of Python that might not feel like Python anymore anyway.
It seems like K would be a particularly suitable language for having more than one syntax. The short syntax, once you get used to it, would be better for keyboard input and expert whiteboard discussions, but it might also be nice if there were also a standard syntax that was longer and closer to what most people expect? An editor could automatically translate between short and long syntax, and this would be helpful for making sure you typed what you think you did.