Why the name 'Asha'?
That's my beautiful wife's name and it means Hope (which is a functional programming language) in sanskrit.
Why ashaspeak.org?
Asha.* was already taken and in this way I can refer to Newspeak from George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four: a language with a shrinking vocabulary. That fits nicely with Asha's small vocabulary.
Why another language, since there are already so many?
Because it's fun and I learn quite a lot from developing it.
At first I wanted to make a functional programming language like Miranda or Amanda, but
after working my way through "Implementing functional languages: a tutorial"
by Simon Peyton Jones and David Lester I knew I wanted to make something different: a basic language for mathematical
problem solving with a complex and challenging interpretive side.