Though GH repo is not updated for more than 3 years and maybe it's just my inexperience or I am spoiled, but from lack of proper documentation I have no idea how to setup and use this language? On what platforms does it work?
Also looking in the examples, it looks somewhat APL'ish due to use of special characters. How do I type them (and do it quick) on regular laptop?
The main Nile compiler here is written in Maru, a programming language of Ian Piumata's which is another awesome project on it's own. It's essentially a Lisp where you can define how the evaluator behaves for a given type.[2] The version of Maru used is included in the Nile repo though. It can be built with GCC or MinGW. The compiler translates Nile to either Maru or C code.
There's a squeak version which can be found at [3]
And also a Haskell vector library which exposes a similar interface to Cairo, but is modeled as Gezira under the hood (used for purely functional image generation). Although this implementation is function based and doesn't really provide a proper streaming abstraction as provided by Nile. [4]
[1]: https://github.com/damelang/gezira/tree/master/js
[2]: http://piumarta.com/software/maru/
Looks very interesting, it's a bit sad to see things like:
https://github.com/damelang/nile/issues/4
Mostly hanging from this summer. I would love it if more of these code dumps from research projects at least included a section on how to get the examples running (and something on requirements, such as which OS it has been tested on, even if that turns out to be "Only tested on DOS 2.1").
Watching that talk and hearing that Nile is a declarative streaming language from the research group where Bret Victor works, I now understand what are the practical applications of such language.