Any experience with unusual technologies ?

Question

99 bottles of beers made me realize that ADA, Erlang and Smalltalk were not so odd languages after all.

There are plenty of unusual tools and I supposed that a lot of them are even used :-)

Have you ever worked with very original technologies ? If yes, let us know in which context, and what did you think about it. Funny snippets strongly expected.

Answer 1

I haven't worked with any unusual technologies but I believe Ada is still very much alive within the defence/aerospace/high reliability circles. It's something I would like to pick up one day.

Answer 2

I think the strangest thing I've 'worked' with was in grade 11 in high school. We were learning about back propogation in neural networks, and we had to do an assignment in some strange hypothetical language that our teacher had come up with.

Answer 3

I've been working professionally with Dyalog APL for almost three years now. It's always fun and challenging to learn a completely different language, and the language has its advantages. But I'm more annoyed than intrigued by it nowadays.

Some particular drawbacks:

• There's almost noone outside the office to ask if you're stuck. There's almost no resources, tips and tricks available online. And noone else in the world has probably done what you're doing anyway.
• You have to reinvent the wheel all the time, since there's really no class/function library to use. (This can be fun for a geek like me, but not very productive.)
• You constantly have to write workarounds or avoid using "modern" features, since the IDE and interpreter are closed-source, and the vendor is too small to have the resources to fixing all bugs.