Showing my age...!
I was always a real fan of LISP. Clearly a rather specialist language (AI etc). but very elegant if used properly in parsing text etc.
Weirdest and yet strangely effective business programming language I have used was RPG II (indicator hell). The later variants III and IV were also very effective for throwing together a business application and benefited from the fact that they part of the AS400 (i-Series) which demonstrated an advanced architecture and database (still does).
Anybody remember the old BBC micro and built in 6502 assembler. Wrote many a lab interface between the BBC and a variety of more modern machines because of the easy use of the assembler and the accessible UART. The ubiquitous Zilog 80 chip and assembler was also very good for interfacing with all sortS of kit.
Aah happy daze!
Whatever programming that gets done these days is done in C# or C++.
Agree with Gertrude about the OO paradigm.
Caco