Lolita: A tagless, dependently typed, self-aware programming language

https://hirrolot.github.io/posts/announcing-lolita.html

by g0xA52A2A • 2 years ago

32 45 2 years ago

hirrolot.github.io

CyberDildonics2• 2 years ago

The name is going to be a problem with anyone taking it seriously but at least the description doesn't make sense.

leovingi• 2 years ago

Thank you for your input on certain names not being taken seriously CyberDildonics

CyberDildonics2• 2 years ago

My 'tagged' CyberDildonics language didn't take off. Maybe I should have made it self-aware.

mchanson• 2 years ago

The debugger is called Chris Hansen.

TheCleric• 2 years ago

You don’t set breakpoints, you ask a line of code to have a seat over there.

0823498723498723• 2 years ago

It was "Hi World" in blogs. It was "Hello World" on the dotted line. But in my tutorials it was always "Lolita".

zeroonetwothree• 2 years ago

And we wonder why women aren’t especially drawn to programming.

paxcoder• 2 years ago

I am a man, and the name of this language is repulsive to me as well

Karellen2• 2 years ago

Especially as, if it were just "In celebration of the 125th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Nabokov", you'd have thought that something like Pale Fire would be a better choice of name for a tech product. Partly because of all the references to it in Blade Runner 2049, but also because Pale Fire is just a much, much cooler name in general.

quickthrowman• 2 years ago

Pale Fire has a lot of good names that would work for a programming language.

Pale Fire, Kinbote, Shade, Zembla, Waxwing, Gradus

…All of which are preferable to the name of the language we are discussing, and I’m saying this as both a fan of the book and film.

0xfedcafe• 2 years ago

Pale Fire sounds awful and lacks any flair. That's exactly what an ordinary programmer with no taste would name their work.

ChrisGranger• 2 years ago

For me, Pale Fire brings to mind Firefox and Pale Moon, so I would assume upon hearing that name that it was a fork of a web browser.

xigoi2• 2 years ago

Because of one project that pretty much nobody knows about and has already been takan down?

lawlessone2• 2 years ago

probably could use a different name... jesus.

Luc2• 2 years ago

That is possibly even worse!

jordanreger• 2 years ago

Nah with a good SEO team it'll be the first result on Google

slowmovintarget• 2 years ago

"The server is risen!"

BurdensomeCount2• 2 years ago

Uptime: Close to 2000 years at this point.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

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...

causal• 2 years ago

Yup. Even if the authors are totally naive to the negative association, this name renders it simply unusable to many organizations. Simply Googling the name on a work computer could land some people in hot water.

dumbo-octopus• 2 years ago

It is very likely the case that the author does not particularly care about what happens to people who google the name on their work computers. They are probably firing any customers that expect a dependable system from their hobby project.

valenterry2• 2 years ago

Yeah I dislike that too. Very annoying. Not as bad as "go" but still, come on, at least change the name a little bit to make it unique but keep the reference you want to use.

Luc2• 2 years ago

Kind of lives in the same neighborhood as Idris?

https://www.idris-lang.org/index.html

GaggiX• 2 years ago

What would the file extension be?

chriswarbo4• 2 years ago

The examples use `.lo`

BurdensomeCount2• 2 years ago

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock...

skilled• 2 years ago

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.

——

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.

puttycat• 2 years ago

"In celebration of the 125th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Nabokov, I am pleased to announce Lolita"

So maybe... name it Nabokov?

arolihas• 2 years ago

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

It's a little disturbing.

valenterry2• 2 years ago

This is awesome. I love languages like that. It tickles my brain just reading about their metaprogramming attempt.

nomdep• 2 years ago

Flagged? That's more childish than the name

sbelskie• 2 years ago

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.

brushfoot• 2 years ago

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.

aebtebeten• 2 years ago

Insofar as the pull quotes that don't have plausible deniability are по-русски, I'm pretty sure the author knew what he was doing. (aiming at deliberate* impopularity: широко известный в узких кругах?)

That said, https://github.com/lolita-lang/lolita/blob/master/docs/desig... is impressive, and I guess, as it's open source, someone could always Bowdlerise the project for HN?

  Don't NAND, don't NAND so
  Don't NAND so close to me

* keep in mind my poor track record: I originally thought the religious conceit of TempleOS might have been a similar ploy.

0823498723498723• 2 years ago

eg completely SFW, the references for the design doc:

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ilaksh• 2 years ago

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?

chriswarbo4• 2 years ago

Ocaml, being in the ML family, makes heavy use of Algebraic Datatypes. For example, from https://www.ocaml.org/manual/5.1/api/List.html we can encode lists like this:

  type 'a t = 'a list =
  | []
  | (::) of 'a * 'a list

In other words, values of type `'a list` are either `[]` (the empty list, like `nil` in Lisp), or `(::)` applied to two arguments (prepending an element to a list, like `cons` in Lisp). We can tell whether a particular value is one of the other by storing a bit of information, called a "tag". We can later branch on that bit to perform pattern-matching.

In constrast, the "tagless" encoding seems closer to Church-encoding. A Church-encoded list is a function which accepts two arguments, say `x` and `y`:

- An "empty list" will return `x` as-is.

- A non-empty list will call `y` with two arguments: one argument is the first element of the list, and the other argument is the result of calling the tail of the list with `x` and `y`.

Such functions have many other names, like "elimination forms", or "induction/recursion schemes", etc.

The linked page shows an example of implementing lists using the tagless approach, which like Church encoding but collects together the required parts in a record. I reckon a similar approach could be implemented via modules, but am not too experienced in Ocaml to know how easy/awkward that would be.

joemi• 2 years ago

What makes it "self-aware"? That was the main reason I clicked on the link but I didn't see that explained.

chriswarbo4• 2 years ago

Presumably the way macros are implemented, using a partially-evaluated metacircular-interpreter.

chriswarbo4• 2 years ago

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.

fuki• 2 years ago

Could use a different name

xigoi2• 2 years ago

It seems to have been taken down, presumably because of the name. Does anyone know if it’s available under a digferent name now?

Lolita: A tagless, dependently typed, self-aware programming language

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