I wanted to thank you for mentioning NSM. I hadn't heard of it before and it's quite exciting and interesting research—seems like a fantastic jumping-off point for building a small language!

thanks for this link. I have been thinking a lot about what the language "primes" are, and my approach was looking at chinese writing's "radicals", a small list of symbols that it combines to form every written word.

i wonder also how well you could get language primes to align with the axes of a word vector, as used in word2vec and other neural network based translation engines. what would a pure vector based language look like, I wonder?

APL is a real programming language used in specialized domains like finance since the 70's I believe and can convey a lot of information in a single line of code. It looks like Greek symbols because it was developed by a mathematician. Pretty cool stuff. The primitive data type is the array so it works well with parallel calculations...etc.