What's weirdest language did you ever use?

[CatalinaWOW]

I had a number of APL zealot friends back when APL was relatively popular.  One of the things they bragged was that there was no problem so complex that you could not write an APL program for it in one line.  Which probably wasn't true, but the fact that it is nearly true is exactly what is wrong with APL.  That one line was totally incomprehensible to anyone, except possibly the original writer.

So put my vote in for APL.


PS.  As I recall those IBM "golf balls" were technically called "type balls".  That may have just been local jargon.

[tggzzz]

Although pretty interesting and in a completely different league, I would also mention Smalltalk.

The core concepts are now mainstream: Java is effectively "typed Smalltalk", and Ojbective-C is "Smalltalk with a C syntax".
(...)

Oh certainly (which is why I said interesting AND in a different league than other weird languages that have been cited). (And agree with the clear descendence in Obj-C, a bit less so in Java, but that's another topic entirely...) Smalltalk was pioneer, and influenced many later languages.

It was still the "weirdest" language I had learned. Whatever "weird" means to each of us.

I'm certainly not going to argue about Java<=>Smalltalk, other than to note that it most nearly approximated Smalltalk's capabilities w.r.t. reflection, lazy loading, binding, etc.

While it was certainly different when I encountered it - especially the environment and libraries and (lack of ) documentation - it fitted in neatly with the way I had been (trying to) programming in C. Instantiation == a customer saying "I want two more of those", and inheritance == a customer saying " I want just that, plus this". Composition is, of course, natural thinking to any engineer except a programmer

[tggzzz]

PS.  As I recall those IBM "golf balls" were technically called "type balls".  That may have just been local jargon.

Local in IBM, maybe. But IBM was infamous for ignoring commonly used names for concepts, in favour of their own impenetrable jargon. What did they call " hard disks"? Was it DASDs, I.e. directly attached storage devices!

Of course, ignoring commonly accepted terms and concepts is an old way of making it sound like you have something different and better. That's something the entire software profession does enthusiastically

[Stray Electron]

I still have an RS232 Selectric with an APL ball.

  I am SO tempted to see if you would be interested in selling that Selectric!  I still have early version of the IBM PC and a my IBM APL package and I'm still dreaming of setting it all up and running it again.  The current printer on the PC is one of the old ALPS daisy wheel printers but the Selectric would be even more retro.  I actually did start looking for a Selectric about 15 years ago and I found some but none with the RS-232 interface.  Even when the Selectrics were commonplace those were always scarce.

   It would cost an arm and a leg to ship a Selectric but if you EVER decide to part with the "golf ball", let me know! I'd be quite happy to add it to my old computer collection.

[Stray Electron]

  One other thought. When I first started learning APL I went out and bought Kenneth Iverson's book. But after years of never using APL I tossed it and all of the other APL stuff that I had. Then later I ended up using APL so I bought the book and other paraphernalia all over again.  Then more years go by and I didn't use it so I pitched that lot.  Then I ended up with an IBM 5100 so I purchased everything for a third time! I eventually sold the 5100 but I've learned my lesson and I'm never going to sell the books again! Somewhere I still have KI's book, some IBM coding forms and my 5100 manuals.

[emece67]

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[MarkL]

I still have an RS232 Selectric with an APL ball.

  I am SO tempted to see if you would be interested in selling that Selectric!  I still have early version of the IBM PC and a my IBM APL package and I'm still dreaming of setting it all up and running it again.  The current printer on the PC is one of the old ALPS daisy wheel printers but the Selectric would be even more retro.  I actually did start looking for a Selectric about 15 years ago and I found some but none with the RS-232 interface.  Even when the Selectrics were commonplace those were always scarce.

   It would cost an arm and a leg to ship a Selectric but if you EVER decide to part with the "golf ball", let me know! I'd be quite happy to add it to my old computer collection.

I will keep you in mind, but it may not be what you think.  The one I have had a dead interface (made by Datel, I think) and was rescued from a trash bin.  I don't think it was RS232 originally.  I removed the old electronics and built new electronics out of a Z80 and family peripherals.  All the really hard mechanical stuff with the solenoids, reed switches, etc. was already done.  It had APL stickers on the fronts of the key caps, so APL was its original vocation.

  https://www.eevblog.com/forum/vintage-computing/what-was-the-very-first-computer-you-owned/msg1331665/#msg1331665

I loved APL so much I also built a CPM machine (also in that post) to run APL and connected it to the Selectric.  We're talkin' around 1980 here.

Last time I turned on the Selectric to show it off to a more modern crowd, the oil was so congealed it promptly raked a bunch of teeth off the bottom of the type ball (they're plastic).  Not so impressive.  But fortunately it wasn't the APL ball.  That would probably be near impossible to replace.

It's waiting for some cleaning and re-oiling before I try that again.

[westfw]

Unless you were masochistic, you wrote your TECO code and then you packed it – you did not do both at the same time! How could anyone read the code, including its author(s)?

What is this "pack" operation you speak of?  (Hmm.  Maybe something EMACS did automatically?  (Looking at my old Twenex EMACS init, I see some '$' characters where I'd expect escapes to be?  Plenty of other bare control chars, though)  But not the non-MIT TECOs.)
While there were "many" non-printing characters used, the OS and Editors of the day would display them pretty clearly (^A for control-A, $ for escape, etc.)Since there were wide swaths where whitespace (spaces and newlines) didn't do anything, you could write reasonably legible code that executed directly.

[HwAoRrDk]

Back in the mid-2000s I had cause to use a scripting language that was part of a product that the parent company of my then-employer made.

It was like a weird bastardised hybrid of C, Visual Basic and Perl. The block structure of C (curly braces, etc) but with the keywords ("if ... then", etc) and object access of VB, and a smattering of single-character special variables like Perl (#, $, @, etc).

Practically the whole product was written in it. The language was actually implemented as an ASP (that's classic ASP, not ASP.net) plug-in language, so it had a dependency on IIS, even though it didn't use it.

[bsfeechannel]

sendmail.cf

[BravoV]

IBM CL

[ivaylo]

Not me, a classmate used to try and impress us with programs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

[jfiresto]

Back in the mid-2000s I had cause to use a scripting language that was part of a product that the parent company of my then-employer made....

That was a time when it seemed like every software vendor wrote their own, special, application specific, fourth generation language (4GL), and left you to deal with it. The last 4GL I had much to do with was Powerbuilder. My boss hated it and not always pianissimo. I left him to that, and hung cartoons over my desk in quiet support, for example:


I did not find Powerbuilder all that bad: I could write nested, event driven code, in it, with little or no fuss. Still, I was happy when people stopped reinventing the wheel and started scripting with existing, complete and competently written languages such as Python and Lua.

[tggzzz]

Back in the mid-2000s I had cause to use a scripting language that was part of a product that the parent company of my then-employer made.

It was like a weird bastardised hybrid of C, Visual Basic and Perl. The block structure of C (curly braces, etc) but with the keywords ("if ... then", etc) and object access of VB, and a smattering of single-character special variables like Perl (#, $, @, etc).

Practically the whole product was written in it. The language was actually implemented as an ASP (that's classic ASP, not ASP.net) plug-in language, so it had a dependency on IIS, even though it didn't use it.

Yes, beat me to it.

Most Domain Specific Languages are an unmaintainable and incomprehensible pile of steaming turds, which could and should have been replaced by a decent library in a standard language.

I came to that realisation 35 years ago when I spent a couple of days creating something convenient but trivial, and later realising I could have done it faster and better in Forth. Everything I have seen since then has confirmed that opinion.

In the worst case I've seen one take down a company!

[jfiresto]

... Most Domain Specific Languages are an unmaintainable and incomprehensible pile of steaming turds, which could and should have been replaced by a decent library in a standard language....

It is hard to write a good language, and quite rare to find someone good at that and addressing the domain. Creating a DSL as a good library in a tested, competently realized language greatly improves the odds of success.

[tggzzz]

... Most Domain Specific Languages are an unmaintainable and incomprehensible pile of steaming turds, which could and should have been replaced by a decent library in a standard language....

It is hard to write a good language, and quite rare to find someone good at that and addressing the domain. Creating a DSL as a good library in a tested, competently realized language greatly improves the odds of success.

Exactly.

Plus you can hire developers (for the mainstream language) and there are many tools available (e.g. IDEs).

[gbaddeley]

I learnt LISP and SNOBOL4 and RPG2 at uni in the early 1980’s. They are certainly very weird when compared the other procedural languages that we also learnt, ALGOL,  PASCAL, COBOL, FORTRAN, K&R C, BASIC.

[daqq]

Well, VHDL is pretty nasty. But the weirdest abomination I've tried at school was Prolog.

[mcovington]

I am honored that Prolog is the one that weirded you out.  It certainly is different! 

Here is what I was writing in the 1990s:
http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/books.html#ppid

I was also on the ISO Prolog standards committee for a long time.  It was weird saying something in a teleconference and having it go into the minutes as, "The United States recommends..."