Janet's biggest draw for me was it's PEG engine and API. That is still excellent.
But I'd say the biggest draw for me now is that Janet has a lot made a lot of choices I agree with.
It's language that boots up very quickly, makes for easy building of CLI tools, compiles to statically linked executables, has full compile-time metaprogramming (Lisp style), and can interface with C libraries very easily.
It doesn't solve any particular novel problem better outside of PEGs, but it makes a lot of the right decisions. And, being a Lisp-like, it also gives enough expressive power to help you build things your way, if you want.
Most of that probably appeals to folks who
a) have been programming for a while
b) don't hate parens
c) Are ok forging in untread territory
Janet isn't something I'd build a business on, not quite yet, but it has been a very, very satisfying hobby, and I've written a lot of small tools in it, more than Nim or Go during my times with either of those.
Mostly just time and testing coverage, and more packages for various things. Maybe another 10,000 man-hours? I don't know the exact numbers.
For context, I've found and/or helped fix bugs around multi-char string split, process termination on windows, and async IO on Windows. All things that forced me to pop the hood on the language, study relevant OS APIs, and generally yak shave, rather than focus on the task at hand. Which has been really edifying, but would have slowed me down if I was writing for a job.
In the process, I've written a few libraries of my own for things like string manipulation, data schemata, rendering html forms/tables based on a schema, and so on.
If you have people that are competent with C, then Janet atop that could work well, but by itself, it's still a long ways from having all of the things one might expect from Python/Ruby, let alone Java or .NET
But I'd say the biggest draw for me now is that Janet has a lot made a lot of choices I agree with.
It's language that boots up very quickly, makes for easy building of CLI tools, compiles to statically linked executables, has full compile-time metaprogramming (Lisp style), and can interface with C libraries very easily.
It doesn't solve any particular novel problem better outside of PEGs, but it makes a lot of the right decisions. And, being a Lisp-like, it also gives enough expressive power to help you build things your way, if you want.
Most of that probably appeals to folks who a) have been programming for a while b) don't hate parens c) Are ok forging in untread territory
Janet isn't something I'd build a business on, not quite yet, but it has been a very, very satisfying hobby, and I've written a lot of small tools in it, more than Nim or Go during my times with either of those.