Interesting, I wasn't aware of that, although it certainly felt like academic-grade code, which someone once described to me as "thrown together by a caffeine-crazed grad student at 3am and run on at least one test case". It's a real pity because there were some really good ideas in there, but the required tooling would have been just too much for just two people to assemble out of whole cloth.

Do you mean they created the tools to be unusable, so that they would get training contracts :D ?

It was whatever they were shipping in the early 1990s, CLI tools. It cross-compiled to mangled C++ which made it un-debuggable outside of inserting print statements, compile turnaround for even a small program was 20 minutes on a reasonably speedy DECstation (now pair this with the debugging comment), it used some node-locked licensing scheme where, when the compiler crashed, which it did a lot, it left the lock active so someone with root access had to come in and remove it, and lots, lots more that I can't remember. It's a pity camera phones didn't exist back then or I'd have a photo of a whiteboard with a drawing of the Eiffel tower, broken in half in the middle, and a figure in a noose labelled "Meyer himself" hanging from it.

Nice language, but seriously cursed by unusable tooling.