I was tempted to say Ruby, but based on my friends that are learning (or tried to learn Japanese), it seems like Ruby is trying to be the opposite. So not sure.
Ruby would maybe fit with toki pona : terse, simple, predictable.
We give them our main milestones, what we hope to accomplish in the way of federation and features, and pay per milestone completed. NLNet is focused on lemmy's codebase, not this or any other instance. They're a really wonderful organization, and the projects they support speaks for itself as to their positive influence on open source: https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html
No probs, thx!