Scala is a good example of a weird programming language with smart users. The book Hands on Scala Programming is a great way to learn how to express code and t

Scala is a good example of a weird programming language with smart users. The book Hands on Scala Programming is a great way to learn how to express code and think in new ways. Paul Graham also talks about the power of different programming languages in Beating the Averages, see The Blub Paradox: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html Powerful / weird languages usually aren't the productivity hack you'd hope. A few team members might be more productive with a weird language, but other folks will have trouble understanding their code, so they'll be less productive. Weird programming languages also require different types of library support (programmers that are passionate about immutability can't use a JSON library that mutates stuff). So they'll build a separate JSON library, but that fractures communities. It's great to learn about different languages, but programmers seem susceptible to the allure of extra productivity from weird languages and that's not what I've seen.