whether he succeeded, is debatable. But APL is definitely powerful, succinct and "regular".
In APL you don't infer the operation from the types at all. × is elementwise, +.× is inner product /always/, on scalars, vectors, matrices, whatever. The glyph tells you what happens. Nothing is bold, nothing is inferred, nothing depends on what your professor assumed you'd absorbed.
I've been trying to get into Iversonian languages myself with the book: Calculous on J