I came across Nile for the first time in 2011
When Alan Kay presented his talk "Programming and Scaling" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9xLi0iJg1g best watch the whole talk!) The Idea to create an Approach that satisfies the users demands for personal computing in less than 10000 lines of Code, powered by DSL and other advanced concepts, seemed intriguing.
I searched the web and there was little to noting I found.
Later I found this talk in that at the end Dan Amelang also answers QA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY.
The Problem with the STEPTS project is that you need all the parts together: Maru, Nile, Gezira etc..
And then the github repository appeard, which was great but not many ( anyone at all?) got Nile to work.
I wonder what happend to the STEPS project? Is their little "Frank" project somewhere avaiable? It would be so great if one could tinker arround with frank e.g. on the rasberry pi.
I think even if Dan needs some more time or what ever a kickstarter campaign (or something like that for science) could be found. People need computing, and a system which reduces the complexity to just 10000 lines of code and moves away with applications, it would be just so great.
I hope we can see such a system soon avaiable to the public, it would not need to be perfect, I can imagine people ( a community) gathering arround that idea easily.
VPRI Info: http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Gezira Github: https://github.com/damelang/nile