Yes, the IEC 61131 languages. AWL is a crippled assembler language, ST is a crippled Pascal.
Industrial automation is for masochists. The usual explanation is that the PLCs need to be programmed by electricians without any college degree, but (a) are electricians not stupid and (b) would better languages not need to be more complicated.
Our experience was not that companies think electricians are stupid, but that they're electricians: they know electrical stuff, not computer programming. A ladder diagram is immediately recognizable to an electrician or technician who needs to diagnose an equipment failure and wasn't involved in writing the program.
FWIW if you're building something at a certain small scope ladder is perfectly serviceable.
Despite the masochism, it was a fun field to work in for a time. Since the industry demands these shitty esoteric programming languages, you end up with all these small companies writing their own compilers and runtimes. It's a unique opportunity to do real-life compiler development from the ground up.
Anywho, cool, robust, reliable things still got made, you just had to think differently. It was very interesting to think about those programs and their relative programming simplicity when compared to complex, modern C++ that is running in other codebases I've seen since then.