There isn't much activity on Github. The last release was nine years ago and all the code contributions are from a single person.
Why french?
- "Piece of art" didn't communicate engagement with the item as art
- "Work of art" is often used to mean a masterpiece
- "Artwork" is a neologism of the sort I avoid
Finally, "objet d'art" communicates appreciation as art, but not necessarily any artistic quality, and it's a phrase people use in this context.
While we're asking irrelevant questions, why are the majority of your comments questions and criticisms of trivial matters of wording? Obviously, we agree that words are important, but it's equally important to engage with the intended meaning of those words.
It may be derived from French, but it has a distinct meaning in English. You might as well ask why someone is using French when they say they're going to see a ballet. It's a feature of English (and really, most languages) that foreign words and phrases are often imported and given connotations distinct from both the meaning in the language of origin and from other words or phrases in English. Once that adoption is widely recognized, is it really not English?
Sure, you're not going to want to start up a major project with a long-abandoned language experiment, but frankly it's not much of a step down from even an active language experiment.
I suppose it's got a greater chance of being harder to get going, but so much of that depends on how it was built in the first place that simply being older isn't enough information make much of a guess on that either.
> …the software is currently at a very early "proof of concept" stage, requiring the addition of many operations (such as basic number and file operations) and optimizations before it can be considered useful for any real-world purpose.
This is pretty different from your characterization as a finished experiment.