Kona is actually an implementation of k (not sure if he's planning to support q, which is k's successor), a cousin of J.

K was originally written by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_(computer_scient..., and having seen some of his C code, this looks like a very similar style. Take a look here: http://www.nsl.com/papers/origins.htm

edit: included link to a better source example