You are smart enough. These articles (both this one and the longer "A history of APL in 50 functions") get posted here from time to time. They are showing off a

You are smart enough. These articles (both this one and the longer "A history of APL in 50 functions") get posted here from time to time. They are showing off and include some examples of very clever code (which made perfect sense in the context in which they were written), but they are not introductory material. In my opinion, APL lacks a good tutorial. Iverson's book or Turing Award lecture teach you about the principles, but they are outdated with respect to current implementations. Dyalog has a very nice on-line tutorial, but it does not teach you how modern APL is written (using dfns and tacit expressions) and it is a bit too long. They have lots of other information scattered around, and exhaustive reference material and great tools like tryapl.org, but there is not (IMO) a good introduction for a total newbie. Learning about derived languages like J and K also helps (and both are great languages in their own) but can be difficult too. Moreover, there are subtle differences between all of them that are not easy to digest at first. So, you have to be willing to make a considerable effort to get started. You do not need to be very smart, but may need some hand holding to not get lost. The good thing is that there is a quite active community that, although not very big, is helpful and engaging. Once you pass the bump at the beginning of the learning curve, articles like the one posted here will make your day. I think it is worth it, but YMMV.