The APL family was developed to think about math and linear algebra in particular. Iverson's "Notation as a tool of thought" f'rinstance:
<a href="http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm</a><p>If you've worked with such things for your day job, exposure to an APL language is mind blowing in the same way as exposure to Lisp is. You'll rapidly find out that an awful lot of the numerics world is an ad-hoc reinvention of an APL language. Leading thinkers in the numerics world have noticed. Have a look at the Tensor type inside Torch7, or -idx- class in Lush (the same thing): they are, in fact, a sort of APL with a more conventional, aka painfully wordy, notation.<p>Writing an editor in an array language seems crazy, but then, writing a parallel processing system in a language that was designed to run applications in your web browser also seems crazy. If people had stuck with APL style languages, well, databases, particularly distributed databases (Kx and 1010, both K based systems, scale to Pentascale, and have for a long time), would suck less, as would CUDA programming. Their revival could make life easier in these problem domains.