Other programming languages this author has worked on:<p>Droplet: "Datalog in time and space" - <a href="https://github.com/jamii/droplet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jamii/droplet</a><p>Eve: "Datalog meets Smalltalk" - <a href="https://witheve.com" rel="nofollow">https://witheve.com</a><p>Imp: "An Eve for people who build Eves" - <a href="https://github.com/jamii/imp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jamii/imp</a><p>These are some pretty "out there" languages with a high strangeness budget, so I'd expect the same of Zest.<p>I like the idea of exploring the interaction models that Eve provided but instead with a "well-trodden ground of a mostly-familiar imperative language", but I'm curious how that will work since the interactions in Eve were made possible due to the datalog-like language design. So my initial question is how "mostly-familiar" Zest really is; what imperative concessions does the language make to gain which interactions?<p>With Eve, a lot was gained just by keeping a database of compiler artefacts that would normally be thrown away. This allowed for a degree of "provenance" tracking, where you can ask the compiler how a runtime value came to be.<p>I think there's an interesting middle ground where maybe we can get a bunch of the things in Eve that were nice, but maybe tone down the weirdness budget to lower the learning curve. Maybe that's Zest? Will be interesting to follow this project.
I could not tell if this is a hobby project, or the product of a research lab. Does anyone know? Very cool stuff. It would benefit from some institutional support.
The docs have test cases embedded in the markdown. This is a pretty cool use of markdown. I have started doing something similar with markdown in my project. I wonder if other programming languages have done this too.