A demon of our own design

A new book about financial derivatives, A Demon of Our Own Design, by 
Richard  Bookstaber discusses an APL incident(pages 43- 47).  He 
describes a problem that APL had difficulty in handling well - in the 
last century.:)  The problem was "there was not enough memory to hold a 
matrix of high enough dimensionality to solve the problem with an 
acceptable level of precision."  Looping through the data was 
inefficient due to the interpreting nature of APL.

Since then, available memory has grown rapidly and I have heard of APL 
compilers.  I am curious as to the reaction of experts on APL  - to the 
book and the issues raised.