I was chasing his Elephant and ran into this thread on LtU where the paper was cited. Discussion is brief but substantial if you are interested.
I hadn't heard of Elephant. That is interesting. It would take a bit to convince me it has advantage over traditional formal grammars, or declarative languages. Algol derivatives and, you know, every other structured programming language. "Refer to the past directly" sound suspiciously like versioning. In fact, most of the language sounds like a bunch of high-level concepts and abstractions smooshed together. The last time someone tried that, we got C++.Algolic programs refer to the past via variables, arrays and other data structures.
Its not merely about syntax. Of course John is RIP so I am guessing. I was chasing elephant since I read an interview of his yesterday (infoQ) and he was talking about the concept, and it sounded very much like what I am working on now. The underlying system is a (hopefully -- shopping for consensus algos now) linearly scalable database. (Cap:AP semantics.) The persistence layer is content addressable, but the system is Temporal (Yes, MVCC). It has a 'theory of minds and collective knowledge' that informs the design. Key point/insight is realizing that f (t, k) -> v can support a lambda calculus (LISP, though Prolog as query language would work as well). Bonus: Since every computation is on past -- isn't that how your brain works, too? :) -- IO does not require monadic gymnastics. And in honor of JMC, have decided to call the (maybe one day happening) language on top of it -- think a distributed LISP Machine -- FEAL-T. Feal means Elephant in Persian and T is for Temporal and Fealty is a characteristic of Elephants ..