> babelfish language

Yes, exactly! It's more akin to a bash pipeline, but instead of plain text flowing through sed/grep/awk/perl it uses json flowing through jq/lua/handlebars.

> The |> seems to have been inspired by Elixir

For me, F#!

> and then Rust is also used

Rust is what the runtime is written in.

> It also seems rather verbose.

IMO, it's rather terse, especially because it is more of a configuration of a web application runtime.

> why would people favour this

I dunno why anyone would use this but it's just plain fun to write your own blog in your own DSL!

The BDD-style testing framework being part of the language itself does allow for some pretty interesting features for a language server, eg, the LSP knows if a route that is trying to be tested has been defined. So who knows, maybe someone finds parts of it inspiring.

> it's just plain fun to write your own blog in your own DSL!

It’s the perfect thing for skill development, too. Stakes are low compared to a project at work, even one that’s not “mission critical”.