I like Ivy's[0] approach by using keywords instead of symbols. I feel like something like APL should either be embedded in some host language, be given lots of functionality for I/O, or some static type system with rank polymorphism.
I agree!! I think having APL be a embedded domain-specific language is the perfect fit. I don't want to give up record and union types when I'm programming something large; but some piece of the app I'm writing will want to perform vector math or compute order statistics, and for that there's nothing better than APL. Note that Python and numpy is shockingly close to this state of the world already: Python's the general language, and numpy is the beautiful vector escape hatch. If only Python and numpy were statically typed.
[0]: https://github.com/robpike/ivy