Question

The textual versions may improve readability for non-programmers, but otherwise I can’t imagine any differentiators.

Answer 1

From symbolic ones the && is syntactically invalid in XML (JSPX, Facelets), because it’s a reserved XML character. You’d prefer the textual one in EL then. Since consistency is a good thing, you’d like to do the same for other operators.

By the way, the empty operator doesn’t have a direct symbolic counterpart since it not only tests on null, but also on empty string (or collection size). Most close would be:

${var == null && fn:length(var) == 0}

The argument for empty would then be that it is less typing and doesn’t require JSTL functions.