[JasonFruit]

I don't know, maybe someone wanted to try writing a program in it, which seems not irrelevant to programming languages. To most people, even an experimental programming language isn't just an objet d'art; it's more like an ornate tennis racket, and it doesn't look like this one will ever be strung.

[jp0d]

Thank you. Aptly written. Even if the idea is fantastic, if not much happens for years, it's almost safe to assume that the product is sort of dead. But it kind of depends! An old academic language like Standard ML might not get a lot of action on its repo (actually gets updated frequently), I'd still use it as it forms the basis of several successor languages.

[rtepopbe]

Just because it hasn't seen activity in awhile doesn't mean it can't be used at all.

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.

[JasonFruit]

The home page is careful to point out that it lacks a lot that would be needed to make it capable of doing interesting and useful things:

> …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.

[canadianfella]

> objet d'art

Why french?

[chowells]

Why do you think it's French? The term has developed a distinct meaning among speakers of English. It has slightly different connotations than alternative phrases, as the sibling comment points out.

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?

[JasonFruit]

That's a reasonable question, and one I asked myself. I considered some options:

- "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.