Perfect solution for doing analysis on tables. Wes McKinney (inventor of pandas is rumored to have been inspired by it too).

My problem with APL is 1.) the syntax is less amazing at other more mundane stuff, and 2.) the only production worthy versions are all commercial. I'm not creating something that requires me to pay for a development license as well as distribution royalties.

Agreed. I once used it for data preparation for a data science project (GNU APL). After a steep learning curve, it felt very much like writing math formulas — it was fun and concise, and I liked it very much. However, it has zero adoption in today's data science landscape. Sharing your work is basically impossible. If you're doing something just for yourself, though, I would probably give it a chance again.