  Quantum computers have evolved from the theoretical realm into a race to
large-scale implementations. This is due to the promise of revolutionary
speedups, where achieving such speedup requires designing an algorithm that
harnesses the structure of a problem using quantum mechanics. Yet many quantum
programming languages today require programmers to reason at a low level of
quantum gate circuitry. This presents a significant barrier to entry for
programmers who have not yet built up an intuition about quantum gate
semantics, and it can prove to be tedious even for those who have. In this
paper, we present Qwerty, a new quantum programming language that allows
programmers to manipulate qubits more expressively than gates, relegating the
tedious task of gate selection to the compiler. Due to its novel basis type and
easy interoperability with Python, Qwerty is a powerful framework for
high-level quantum-classical computation.
