@Pavel The clever people at IBM needed a name to call it. No-one could think of a name. It was inspired by
a paper by Ken Iverson which was a description of a programming language (an imaginary one, not an implemented one). As a temporary measure, they called it by the initials of the paper. Note that APL does not even remotely resemble the imaginary language in the Paper, and most APLers would be incapable of reading the paper's notation.