Comment by Vosporos

ANF is very much not considered a dead-end. It is the opposite number of SSA from the Functional programming languages perspective. CPS overlaps with it but also has properties, like requiring whole-program transformation, that do not help with predicting the final shape of the program.

See https://pauldownen.com/publications/anf-continued.pdf, https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/13w3c... and https://langdev.stackexchange.com/a/2254 (as well as https://www.college-de-france.fr/sites/default/files/media/d... as a bonus)