Well, there are monthly international newspapers and magazines. That you can even pay so they can afford not to have to rely on AI and have (hopefully) real journalists do the work. That are also available in digital form. I agree with you that the flood of streaming news is neither healthy nor helpful in creating priorities and perspective. Let's not starve the obvious alternative, as long as it still exists.
This is really good news, I am looking forward to trying it out! Is XQuery also planned as an additional frontend? By the way, there is also χrust, a rust project working towards pretty similar goals (XPath 3.1, XQuery 3.1 and XSLT 3.0). At first glance, the architecture also seems quite similar, it is not as far along, though. Have you had any contact with them?
Python has its version of the ternary operator as well. It may look unusual due to the different order of the operands, but it works quite nicely, in my opinion:
x = (-1 if a < b else
1 if a > b else
0)
This emphasizes the possible values that x may be assigned to.
I agree, the ternary style is better for this sort of variable assignment situation. Usually if I am using the above pattern I am calling different functions as the result of the conditionals.