Sounds like a descendant of Goldman Sachs‘s SecDB/Slang with automatic dependency graph building. Did it have purple children (nodes whose value influences the graph structure) and twiddle scopes (modified copies of subtrees)? :-)
It was ubiquitous in GS by the mid-2000s, and was rather instrumental to GS navigating the crisis in 2008.
Being able to accurately and quickly compute risks across the entire firm's books, rather than manually merging across separate systems was key advantage, which encouraged JP, Citi and BofA to build a SecDB clone themselves.
https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/history/moments/1993-s...
I've not heard the term "twiddle scopes" before; in Athena it is "tweaking".
For finance applications (risk) the whole concept works quite well, doesn’t it - combining the natural advantages of code and Excel.
[Disclosure: I was part of the Quartz Core team in 2011/2012.]
I suspect the Common Lisp influence was beneficial.
The weirdest thing, language-wise, that I noticed was scoping. It's neither dynamic nor static scoping, but weird scoping. (But there are work-around to get something like static scoping.)
Outside of the language, the whole CVS-based version control and review process was weird. But understandable as a product of the late 1990s, when review-before-going-into-permanent-history must have been way ahead of its time.
Not the spaces in variable names?
But I was used to different and exotic conventions from the obscure languages I played with over the years.