I've looked at some of the ascii APL relatives, and my impression was that they are probably great for working with numbers, but seem like they'd be bad for working with text and other things. Am I missing something here?
K relaxes the traditional APL constraints on "rectangular data", which makes it comparatively quite good at dealing with text manipulation. I frequently use K for working with text and it works nicely. Anything you can represent as a list structure can have all the traditional APL-ish tools brought to bear on it.
As for "other things", here are a few K sketches I've written recently:
