It won't attract funds, I guess, but it would be far more trivial to make this work with an APL or a Lisp/Scheme. There already is great research for APL[0] and looking at the syntax of HVM-core it seems it is rather easy to knock up a CL DSL. If only there were more hours in a day.
However, given the aesthetic that you express, I think you might like https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns/. This is hands-down my favorite kind of APL, in which the data flow literally follows the linear code flow.
Hopefully this won't be seen as too combative, but I feel like there are a few people in the array community giving me some pretty strong conclusions that they don't really have the experience to back up (Aaron wrote[0] 17 lines of array compiler, and says the low-abstraction approach he used is the only way to develop sustainably. Cool. I wrote[1] 350 lines of array compiler following his style, and I disagree[2]). At the same time, my experience only goes so far (there's no way I would have invented the array style compiler!), and clearly you arrived at these conclusions somehow. So is there a chance you'd share the observations that led you that way?
On my end, I was actually introduced to a little object-oriented programming in J when Henry suggested using it for a simulation project. I used it, but I don't think I really got it—just a weird way to organize data. And then in college I had to learn objects-only Java. Not good. But later I worked some with Node.js, and its module system was pretty nice: no name conflicts, easy to share code! Some way into BQN development, I figured out (with some help from a Common Lisp programmer) a way to add modules with an APL-y syntax, and something magic happened. I got objects[3] too! I think I've done about as much OOP in BQN as anywhere else, and I feel like I understand it a lot better now.
So, this is my experience with Lisp-family features and APL. Fits like a glove, programming is easier and more fun. I mix and match array, functional, and object-oriented styles however I want. Did I lose coherence? When I translate my old J code it comes out shorter and cleaner and without exec (".) everywhere. But I still don't get why I should want the language I use to not support mutability rather than just default to immutability. Did I fail to understand something in J when I had the chance?
[0] https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns
[1] https://github.com/mlochbaum/BQN/blob/master/src/c.bqn
[2] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/implementation/codfns.html
I recently arrived at a similar design for manipulating NFAs as adjacency matrices, as a replacement for more pointer-y adjacency lists, by way of sparse matrix data structures. Rather than Zig's performance angle, I found that it made whole-graph operations much easier to implement and reuse.
I've also seen similar approaches from array languages like APL, for example this project for running this kind of stuff on GPUs: https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns
And, I've seen it in Rust as a "workaround" for the borrow checker, where that framing tends to make it feel like cheating or settling, which IMO is unfortunate since when people arrive at it for other reasons it seems to have a lot of other benefits!
There are probably more contexts I'm not familiar with- anyone have any good examples from domains they've worked in?
IMHO this is an area ripe for more exploration. If I were working on it, I might look to linking first before compilation, because the basic link task is more similar to what GPUs are good at (advanced stuff such as LTO is a different story, though).
http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories/
https://www.categoricaldata.net/
https://terminusdb.com/blog/ (It's a little market-ey, dig around for the meat. Graph DB in Prolog & Rust, "git for data", etc.)
https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns
edit: Ah it's you agumonkey (I don't check usernames before replying.) Apologies if I sound like a broken record in re: the above topics.
The co-dfns source I've seen[1] is much longer. Do you know if there's a write-up somewhere of the differences between that and Appendix B from the dissertation?