The syntax put me off at first, and still bothers me a bit (something to do with too much symbolic sugar and existing familiarity with escape chars) That said.

The syntax put me off at first, and still bothers me a bit (something to do with too much symbolic sugar and existing familiarity with escape chars) That said... I feel like this streaming syntax might be better suited as a meta-programming framework of sorts...build the more intricate objects/modules in a language such as C/C++ or java, and use these stream/latch metaphors to orchestrate those modules. Yes, you can already do this with *sh (largely the point of Unix pipes), or directly in C/C++/Java (e.g. Storm), but ANI seems to provide a really rich interface for this kind of orchestration. It has many of the right primitives.