I don’t know APL or Perl well enough to know. APL was designed to do matrix calculations as far as I understand. It’s a pretty neat part of computer history. I was at a clients house whose whole office was filled with programming books and one of them was an APL book from the 60s. I can’t wait for that garage sale.
Still in use today. Best way to simulate multidimensional arrays "objects" in BASH? Here perl was a stepping stone in the early days before a fully POSIX compliant solution was found.