Impressive work. The author looks to be in his very early 20s, and his other blogs talk about compiler development and calculus.
The PDF of the language reads like ancient scriptures to me.
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Re: name
I have emailed the author about the name choice and whether he would reconsider it as I think this is a high-quality project. The author is on HN (same name as his GH handle) so maybe he will reconsider.
I see that the stated reason for the name is that today would have been Nabokov's 125th birthday. But Nabokov had other works (why not call it palefire?) and this could have been released on any particular day. So the connection is tenuous at best.
And then there is the docs, taste.md?
A taste of Lolita
Very impressive feature set, which aligns with many of my own interests too (symbolic execution, partial evaluation, etc.). If nothing else, it's the first explanation of "finally tagless" that clicked for me!
I agree with others that the name is needlessly off-putting.
It was "Hi World" in blogs. It was "Hello World" on the dotted line. But in my tutorials it was always "Lolita".
What is this tendency of naming so many programming languages with some already relatively common words, why isn't there proper search engine optimization going on? I can kinda excuse pre-internet ones, but new ones? Just why are people making lives hard for others...
> Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ears. How simple! The moment, the death that I had kept conjuring up for three years was as simple as a bit of dry wood.
This is on the language FAQ. If memory serves this is the scene where Humbert has tracked down Dolores later in life and is contemplating murdering the now pregnant girl who he earlier sexually abused. What the actual hell? If this is supposed to be a joke it’s in decidedly poor taste. And that’s the best case.
The debugger is called Chris Hansen.
This is awesome. I love languages like that. It tickles my brain just reading about their metaprogramming attempt.
Anyone care to do a direct comparison with Ocaml? It seems that the types are featured more prominently here. I always thought that type inference was a strength of Ocaml. Maybe that is unpopular now?
Kind of lives in the same neighborhood as Idris?
What makes it "self-aware"? That was the main reason I clicked on the link but I didn't see that explained.
It seems to have been taken down, presumably because of the name. Does anyone know if it’s available under a digferent name now?
> "In celebration of the 125th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Nabokov, I am pleased to announce Lolita"
So maybe... name it Nabokov?
What would the file extension be?
The name is going to be a problem with anyone taking it seriously but at least the description doesn't make sense.
And we wonder why women aren’t especially drawn to programming.
Could use a different name
Flagged? That's more childish than the name
probably could use a different name... jesus.
At 19, the author's age, I was two years into my Nabokov obsession. I wouldn't have understood why the name was a problem, either. Personally, I'd have thought anyone who criticized it was a philistine. (Nabokov's self-styled "strong opinions" had that effect on me at that age.) Didn't they know the _point_ was that Humbert was a monster, etc. 15 years later, life experience has broadened my horizons a bit, but I still remember the feeling of being under the influence of such an eloquent writer for the first time.
This isn't to justify the name itself but to cut the author some slack since the name is attracting more attention here than the design, and understandably so, but the design is an achievement, and a laudable one. I'd hope someone would've done the same for me at that age if I'd gone public with a project like this.