[tetron]

CWL project co-founder here. It's funny, I have been trying to start a discussion of CWL on HN for years, obviously someone else had to do it.

The goal is to provide a way to describe dataflow processes that is highly portable, auditable, and reproducible. This is incredibly important in research, clinical, and regulatory domains where you need to be able to show how you came up with a result.

It's not a general purpose language on purpose, and operational concerns like notifications are the domain of specific implementations (engines).

I agree the syntax is horrible (and I designed most of it) but it also makes it easy to write programs that read and write CWL, enabling an ecosystem. For example, here is a transpiled languages that emits CWL:

https://github.com/common-workflow-language/cwl-ex

[Edmond]

something worth looking at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Execution_Lan...