Ape is supposed to be a boring language with C-like syntax that's very easy to embed and use (coming from game development there's definitely a need for that). Although I do think that the way it handles crashes with "recover" statement brings something new to the table.
i think a lot people who make their own language is for personal engineering instead of making an PL argument. "boring" languages are underrated imo, almost every language have some bloat like OOP or whatever, to me it's interesting to think about what's the barebone of imperative scripting and how we can do subtraction instead of addition
It doesn't provide any functions for binary data manipulation (for now), but you can create a custom data type using "ape_object_make_external" and add native functions for reading/writing to it.