is anyone aware of a simple, open source expression language that is amenable to / built for static analysis to infer data dependencies? somethin' like spreadsheet formulas but maybe intended for authoring in a text box bigger than 14px high

There are a bunch of systems that use the cells-with-formulas/relationships model behind the scenes. Here are two from the Clojure world: • https://www.maria.cloud by @Jack Rusher et al. • https://github.com/hoplon/javelin (used in the https://hoplon.io web framework)

We use a spreadsheet like dataflow model in Maria, and it's definitely for authoring more than 14px high blocks. I'm still not sure it's what you want, but if you tell me a bit more I'll try to put you on the right path.

It may be a stretch, but depending on your use case Dhall might be interesting. It's basically a total functional language for generating JSON. https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang I assume it's amenable to static analysis, but I don't know what kinds are available off the shelf.

thanks for the links folks! the intention would be to use this language as a way for users of a low-code app builder tool to quickly author small snippets for the code part of the low-code. still just exploring, but i'm interested in picking a language that has the right bones for this kind of task so that the platform can handle at least some of the accidental complexity around managing n+1s or pushing predicates down to the database or what have you. so far the thing that seems most appealing would be https://github.com/Agoric/Jessie i think for developer familiarity and dropping a lot of the dynamism of JS to get back to something i have a hope in hell of analyzing