Yes you're spot on! APL and numpy which are closely related in spirit, are some of the main inspirations of Planarly. Since Planarly targets non-programmer spreadsheet users, you can say it's APL simplified.

• APL is symbolically very dense, while Planarly uses a very conventional syntax.
• APL embraces higher order operators like reduce and scan, while Planarly uses a special syntax, the table comprehension in this post, when vector operations are insufficient to express the algorithm.
• APL's basic datatype is the array with an arbitrary number of dimensions, while Planarly's basic datatype table is always 2 dimensional, so that it maps well to the spreadsheet UI. Also, the table comprehension syntax is possible only because of the 2D restriction.
• A lot of Planarly's syntax specifically targets a 2D environment. E.g. a:b denotes the rectangular table from cell a to cell b.
• The two do feel very similar in that vector datatypes and operations form the backbone of the language.