May 30, 2007

Loop until kthxbye

Now there's lolcode:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10 O RLY?
	YA RLY
		BTW this is true
		VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
	NO WAI
		BTW this is false
		VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
	KTHX
KTHXBYE

In addition to the lolcode site itself, which of course includes a wiki, you should check out the scholarly appreciation at Notes from a Linguistic Mystic ("im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect: LOLCode and Feline Dialectology", 5/29/2007):

Periodically, one goes through periods of deep metaphysical malaise. You look around at the world, wondering how such evil could flourish and such suffering could endure. You descend deeper into darkness, your faith in humanity waning, wondering why we were ever born into this cruel world. Then, suddenly, you realize that somebody has written a programming language based off of the dialect of Lolcats/Cat Macros, and your faith in humanity’s inherent good is completely restored.

Indeed. Breathes there a soul so dead, whose spiritual batteries are not recharged by reading

  IZ VAR LESSER THAN 0 O RLY?
      YA RLY
          HALP "Var is too little!"!
  KTHX

So far, no one seems to have taken up the challenge to create an object-oriented lolcode ("lolcode++"?) or a functional lolcode ("lolcaml"?), but I'm not certain of my ability to track memetic evolution as we approach the lolsingularity.

[THX to approximately ℵ0 readers.]

[Update -- Chris Casinghino writes:

I saw your post about lolcode today. While I don't know of a complete functional language in this vein, you might enjoy this recent post to one of the Haskell mailing lists, which defines what might be called a lolmonad:

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-May/026142.html

Several posts in the thread expand on the idea

And in the same vein, Zohar Kelrich writes:

In your recent Language Log posting on FOP (Feline-Oriented Programming) you mentioned the lack of functional-lolcode Actually, research into functional cats has already started, as can be seen here.

This is clearly an active area of research, rapidly advancing towards the lolsingularity.]

Posted by Mark Liberman at May 30, 2007 05:02 AM