The release name for Hel 0.3 is "Syntactic Mead". It's a play on syntactic sugar, a reference to the honey-based drink which plays a role in Norse mythology, and motivated by the change from a Lisp-like syntax to the current, more complex syntax.
I've been thinking of changing the name of the language itself from Hel to Mead. Hel is a cool name, but perhaps not the most positive of names. (Although if Inferno could get away with that name, perhaps Hel is not that bad.) Moreover, Hel stands for "huangho's Experimental Language"; and while it is pretty experimental (and pretty huangho's) now, I expect it to be less so at some point (though that point may be very far away, if it ever gets there). The qualifier 'experimental' made more sense when I had no idea where I was going with this project, but now I have a somewhat clearer idea of where I want to get. Hel 0.3 is basically the incarnation of Hel that thrived; it could use a name of its own. (Of course, I could just change the meaning of the acronym instead.)
One minor problem with the name Mead is that it might be seen as having some thematic relationship to (a.k.a. being a ripoff of) Elixir; but that's a mostly harmless coincidence. There are also a number of projects called "Mead", most of them abandoned, but some active. There is also a company called MeadCo. There are other Hel projects around too; finding good unique names is hard.
Other names I have considered are Eris, which would give me an excuse to throw in lots of Discordian references in documentation, but there are even more active projects with that name around (including, unsurprisingly, a Discord library); and Fenius, after the lengendary guy who created Irish (Gaelic) out of the best parts of all languages after the confusion of tongues in the Tower of Babel. That name seems to be relatively free from conflicts, but I'm not sure it sounds as cool.
(In the Mead of Poetry theme, I also thought of Kvasir, but of course that's also taken by a programming language.)
What do you think? Do you like (or dislike) any of these names? Should I stick to Hel? Have other suggestions? Feel free to comment.
In other news, Hel (Mead? Fenius?) got immutable dictionaries (persistent hashmaps) this week. But I'll write about that later.
@Marcus: Thanks for the feedback!
"No preference on the other options", a.k.a. "I dislike all of them" :P
From the current options, I think 'Mead' sounds best, but 'Fenius' is less prone to confusion with other projects (although, *of course*, there is an old software project called Fenius: https://esnetupdates.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/title-the-fenius-project-enabling-virtual-circuits-around-the-globe/ ). I'll keep thinking about other options too.
"No preference on the other options", a.k.a. "I LIKE all of them"
FTFY :-)
@Marcus: Oh, okay :)
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Marcus Aurelius Farias, 2019-05-08 11:59:16 -0300 #
Even though Hel ≠ Hell, I would prefer a name that looks more "positive" if you ask. No preference on the other options.