Declarative knitting

Hi folks!
There's a project I've made a start at a few times, but not entirely followed through, to make a kind of programmable knitting pattern generation toolkit.  The aim of this would be to make a kind of API for specifying knitting patterns programmatically - this would allow patterns to be generated based on data and computation, where this would be complex or laborious to do by hand, and to make the infrastructure behind it shared and re-usable.
My motivation for this comes from a few different projects I've done in the past to make mathematical shapes - I found that usually the computation part was quite straightforward, but outputting this as something I could knit took up most of the effort.  For example, calculating surfaces of revolution, or mapping images into polar coordinates.  At the same time, I design a lot of toys, and find that the bulk of this, especially the shaping, uses a pretty small number of concepts, which can easily by layered on top of each other.
The big idea behind how I'd like this to work is for the patterns to be expressed in a "declarative" style - a designer should be able to express "work in stocking stitch, increase evenly along the edges, for 10 rows", and leave the program to work out which specific stitches needs to do what.  The system should then be able to generate a fully detailed pattern, and express it in common formats - as text, charts, or others.  And of course this should be extensible, so that it's easy to add in new "rules" which can be used, particularly as there are so many styles of knitting that it would be impossible to express them all beforehand.
Then my big aim with all of this is that it would become possible to create "rules" based on complex computation too.  I'm working on a few of these initially - one which creates shadow knitting patterns based on images, one which creates lace patterns using edge detection, and one which will makes lace patterns from cellular automata.  Of course, these are only examples, but my hope is that I'll be able to take quirky ideas like these and make them accessible as a website where knitters can automatically generate patterns of their own.

The code for all this will be open source, and is on github:  https://github.com/griffiths-hugh-git/declarative-knitting/issues
The web services I'm hoping to get deployed on AWS in the next few weeks.

I'm pretty excited about it all!
Hugh.