I think the focus on the state machine may be the problem. I don't know much about prolog, or why it doesn't really enjoy more status in the programming world, but I suspect that while it is good at repesenting states, it is not very useful for writing programs...

Case in point, the pong programs. Looking at the impl, vs a <50 line js impl, this looks more like an assembly language for state, not necessarily something that makes state more visible or readily apparent...

Having a nice dialect for a (is this formally provable?) state machine is nice, but I'm not convinced founding the language from state machines is the correct approach vs merely using a fluent library e.g. https://stately.ai/docs/xstate

Not saying that I'm correct, but would be interesting to hear more of the philosophy of why Nova, vs just a simplisitic implementation of some card game rules...