[rak1507]

The underlying language isn't really very mathematical, at most there's a bit of linear algebra in the primitives but that's it. You certainly don't need any sort of formal maths education to learn APL. There are about 50 or so new symbols, which is not a big ask, with any sort of focus the majority of the syntax etc can be learned very quickly. The "bugs" in your original code stand out very clearly because things like "∘}" don't make sense, ∘ being "dyadic" (infix).

[RodgerTheGreat]

and it bears mention that a decent chunk of those symbols are things nearly everyone is familiar with from other languages (+, -, =, etc), symbols you've probably seen in math class or on your graphing calculators (÷, ×, ≠, ⌈, ←, etc), and symbols with very strong mnemonic associations once you've seen them explained (≢, ⍋, ⍳, ⌽, etc).