Oh man, count yourself lucky if you never had "fun" with context. :) For everyone who hasn't had that ... joy, imagine perl4, but compiled and running in its own proprietary vm with a ton of employer-environment-specific extensions. It was 100% in-house to the Times. When I interviewed, part of the process was them throwing a screenful of it at you and asking "OK, what does this do?" as a test of your general ability to reason out things you had no possible way of getting pre-exposure to. The only redeeming value that it had really was that it was a) pretty fast b) pretty small in terms of memory requirements. I can't think of a single thing about it that PHP wouldn't be a better fit for though on every metric, and I'm certainly no fan of PHP. After I left that job one of the biggest drivers for me wanting to take compilers eventually was thinking back to what a shitshow working with ctx was and how badly I would've wanted a ctx2php transpiler. I worked on the team that among other things handled the login/auth system, which was sufficiently antediluvian that it had a lot of ctx code.
