The Adama language

Nov 2019 – Apr 2026 · age 37–44

What it was

A statically typed, transactional, reactive language in which one file is one document. There is no main, fields are private unless declared otherwise, tables replace new, and formulas recompute on their own. There is no null, only maybe, and even division returns one, because arithmetic can fail. Errors are abort, which rolls back the whole transaction. States are labels you can store and pass around, channels wait for a person to answer, and "bubbles" are formulas evaluated separately for each viewer. In 2026 it grew agent with typed tools as a peer of record. Only twenty-one words are reserved; everything else is context. It compiled to Java, tested by a gold corpus over a third of which was deliberate failures.

Wins, for the age

At thirty-seven, Jeff put privacy into the grammar itself, so a leak becomes a compile error. That still has no popular equivalent.
Channels that await a person, fetch and choose returning futures resolved by a human, arrived concurrently with Temporal's human-in-the-loop signals (2020).
Found on their own what Swift optionals (2014) had found, then went further: division that honestly returns maybe.
Reserved almost nothing, so the language grew for six years without breaking programs.

What it taught

Make the type system carry the operational promises. Privacy, purity, abort and optionality are declarations the compiler checks.
A gold corpus is a language's memory. What an error says and what a run looks like is defined by hundreds of programs.
The book must follow the parser. The agents chapter drifted within weeks, using syntax the grammar rejects.

Genealogy

Ancestors: BSG Prototype: fifty-four blocking decisions that proved rules can wait on humans. Crml: a typed rule language over facts, Datalog reinvented in a week. Kira Project: a statically typed language compiled into another language. Lamancha II: where the first sketch of the language was written. The Before Times in QBasic: the first home-made language, at sixteen. Descendants: Adama Agents: agent as a peer of record, tools scoped by the compiler. Hearth: the next server, written in plain Java once the language was set down. Opinion Panel: thousands of lines of Adama with five agent declarations. Part of: Adama.

Epitaph

Twenty-one reserved words, fields that kept secrets, arithmetic that admitted doubt, and a transition that could wait a week for a person. Designed by one primate for a card game, it spent its last spring being written by machines.