LOLCODE

This past weekend I attended the BBC's Mashed08 hack day event, in a slightly more professional guise. The creative and hacker energy there was palpable, and it was good fun to be around.

There were a good number of projects that made me laugh in recognition. Not directly presented, but clearly a product of the weekend, was a Python port of Dave Dribin's LOLspeak that we've discussed here previously.

Another sly grin crossed my face as I saw Team Bob's award-winning entry. Although not directly LOL, long readers of the site will recognize Bob Dylan, who once carried the message of the LOL on this blog. The effect created, as Dylan highlighted arbitrary keywords from the newsreader's script, was ROFL-funny. The video has appeared on Vimeo and the creators have posted details.

Also carrying the message of the LOL was the team who did a mashup of BBC News and translated the subtitles to LOLspeak. AWSUM.

I performed a little hack, which I've (update:) finally documented on my own blog. Finally, I got to shake hands with Doctor Who #7, Sylvester McCoy:

P.S.: Don't forget the LOLCODE contest ends in just under a week!

On a slightly more serious note, I notice Joe Gregorio's interesting observations on the ascendancy of virtual machines in the professionalization of scripting languages:

So by now everyone should have seen the SquirrelFish announcement. And MagLev. And you've [seen] Steve Yegge's presentation, ”Dynamic Languages Strike Back”…
All of those things on their own are interesting, but what's more important is that we're talking about them all at the same time. There's real research going on to produce faster VMs and that research is being applied to real scripting languages today. What we are priveleged to witness, something that wasn't happening a year ago, and will probably be complete in another year or two, is the professionalization of scripting languages. There was a time when you could whip out a parser in lex and yacc, stitch together a naive VM and throw it over the wall and you'd have a new scripting language. Those days are coming to a close and in a few years (if not months) you won't be able get traction with anything unless it does direct threading, is register based, has generational GC, does peephole optimizations, does trace-folding, does type-inferenced inline caching, etc….

It's a good read, and anyone interested in the language-geek aspects of LOLCODE would do well to think on it. I'd like to think that LOLCODE is either the thin end of the wedge of that interest or a popular protest against the tendency towards powerful scripting languages.

Oh, and sorry to those of you who saw some chaos on the RSS feed. There were a couple of bumps in the server migration, but it looks to be better now.

It's 17 June, Firefox download day (however, it's been so for about 18 hours from where I sit…). Have you downloaded it yet?

(No comment on the servers being down… Clearly a web server built on LOLCODE could handle this load.)

Update: Firefox is worthy enough, but I was unimpressed with the high-traffic websites not being updated at first.

O Hai!

I needed to update the underlying software running the site, so took the chance to move servers, update the look, and shake things up with the sponsors somewhat. Expect a little bit of dust and disarray, but if there's anything that seems wrong, please contact me at lolcode@lolcode.com as usual…