The Napier88 Persistent Programming Language (1988) [pdf]

I didn't use Napier myself, but some of my colleagues did, and there were frequent cries of 'aaargh! My persistent store has been corrupted!' followed by rebuilding it from source.

But that's not really a criticism of the language itself, merely the implementation, and I didn't have enough experience on it to usefully comment.

The university was deeply into pure research, doing stuff like pure research on garbage collectors and theorem provers in Prolog (one of the lecturers wrote a theorem prover package for the Mac that we used a lot. It was all in Prolog. INCLUDING THE USER INTERFACE). But they were less good at the practical aspects of software engineering; I remember one of the lecturers arguing that we because our DEC Alpha workstations had 32MB of RAM, therefore a twin-space garbage collector of 16MB per space would be optimal...

I did the persistence parts of the course in Smalltalk, which was so much simpler.

The paper references PS-Algol and S-Algol. I did a lot of S-Algol; it was a teaching language used by Glasgow and St.Andrews for basic algorithms courses, the intention being to decouple the algorithm from the implementation. I quite liked it, but --- remember how I said that practical software engineering at St.Andrews wasn't so great? The Mac version had an IDE which did not support cursor key movement. The Unix version didn't have a garbage collector (it just hadn't been implemented).

Good times, good times...