I came here to say the same thing in re: the name conflict with Joy PL. I'm currently working on a Joy interpreter. I'm just getting it ready to post to PyPI (it's implemented in Python.)
It's pretty obscure, but I have high hopes for the language. It has some amazing qualities.
I thought about it a little more and I don't think there should be an issue. This project is a compiler, not a language – Go is the language. It's analogous to Javascript and Babel.
Manfred taught me mathematical logic back in the mid 90s. It was only much later browsing functional programming topics that I discovered his language and that he had passed away.
My mate has an awesome story about providing technical support to him on campus. I hope neither he nor the deceased mind me relating it.
"Hello. Tech support? This is Manfred von Thun. My computer is not working."
"OK, no problem, do you have a PC or a Mac?"
"Neither."
<Pause>
"Neither?"
"Yes. Neither."
"Ok, what do you have, then?"
"I have a terminal which connects to the mainframe."
<Pause>
"OK, I'll be right over."
Sure enough, he gets there and there's some godforsaken yellowing text-only terminal thing with a wire plugged into some weird port he'd never seen before, presumably wending its way into the bowels of the university to some long-lost, dusty piece of big iron from computing's distant past.
My mate was incredulous. "So what do you do with this, exactly?"
"I write papers, I write programs, I make web pages."
"Web pages!?"
"Yes, web pages. But I don't believe in graphics."
In spite of his protestations about GUIs, he was eventually given a brand spanking new eMac (this was around about the time he was creating Joy). Once he saw Terminal.app, he no longer seemed particularly concerned.
He was a European gentleman in a remote land with a quirky sense of humour and generous spirit; not your typical stuffy academic in tweed. :) And he had an awesome beard, long before hipsters made them fashionable!
The tribute pages below provide more insights from others.
I was studying in the mathematics department at the time, which was on the other side of the campus from the philosophy department. But there was considerable overlap between pure maths and formal logic. Godel's incompleteness theorem was one of the topics we proved and provided a good theoretical foundation for higher order logic.
Yes, Joy is amazing. I have been working through the Advent of Code puzzles with it and the code keeps coming out error-free. It delivers on Backus' idea of algebra of programs (aka "Functional Programming") in a direct and entertaining way. It also seems amenable to efficient compilation.
I'm pretty sure Joy is a kind of "silver bullet" for programming, in the sense that, as "software is eating the world", Joy will eat software.
It's pretty obscure, but I have high hopes for the language. It has some amazing qualities.