[avmich]

APL has map embedded into language. And reduce is an operator in J. APL is conveniently used by those who don't describe themselves as programmers - let alone as computer scientists - but need to get the job done. In this aspect it's similar to Excel, I think.

I wonder if APL is that much different from Matlab by the concept.

[4thaccount]

Syntactically, Matlab is closer to traditional languages. Where it excels at math is that you can do all sorts of things like solving matrices automatically. APL can invert small matrices, but can't automatically find the best way to solve it like Matlab will do. APL has great mathematical notation, but is missing the math libraries you typically need to do real math work (optimization solvers) which Matlab has via toolboxes and Mathematica has builtin.