The other day I stumbled across the Nile programming language, which was developed by Alan Kay et al, as part of the “STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming” project (a successor to the Smalltalk system).
Apparently one of the feats of this language is that they could implement a 2D graphics library in 495 lines of Nile code.
I was intrigued so I dug a bit deeper, but it was difficult to find much information about the language, as witnessed by this GitHub issue.
In that ticket there’s a couple of hints though, for example the following talk about Nile, where the author describes it as a mix between APL and Haskell! It apprears to be a dataflow/stream processing-based language with implicit parallelism via pipelining.
The Nile source code can be found here, while the graphical library which is called Gezira is available over here. There’s even a partial Haskell implementation of Gezira in that repo.
I believe the STEPs project lost its funding around 2012 and the development stalled around that time.
Anyway, I found this a bit interesting and I thought I’d share in case anyone else’s interested in this topic. Cheers!