APL is the sort of thing I imagine "Programmer-at-Arms" Pham Nuwen used in Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books. It seems both incomprehensibly magical while also impeccably rational, forming the shortest bridge between what the programmer is thinking and what the computer is calculating.

Of course it also seems like you'd be building a bridge no one else could walk over. Not even you-one-year-from-now. I have a hard enough time figuring out what I was thinking when I read Ruby I wrote a year ago.

For more, here's a written tutorial by the same fellow. It had this helpful poscript regarding "glider guns"

Artillery in a finite manifold is a dangerous business.

Hehe. Good advice, I suppose.

Aficionados of the 1979 arcade game "Asteroids", which took place on a torus, will recall that the manufacturers thoughtfully gave their canon a range just short of the screen's circumferences.

Found that out the hard way back in undergrad when we wrote a genetic algorithm which learned to play Asteroids.