Part of the name was a joke about people often mishearing Haskell as Pascal, Ed told me a couple of years ago. I think it might have been at ZuriHac back when it was at Google Zurich, so 2016-ish?
I think the other part of the name is a cannabis joke.
The THC thing was actually unintentional at first. It matched the Borland naming convention for the compiler name and it matched up with GHC.
Now picking CBD for the compressed Core Binary Distribution format we use? That? That was gratuitous.
I read it as "Turbo Hascal"
You are not alone.
No it's a not blue TUI IDE but a Haskell on JVM. Author wasted that concept :|
And it has to weigh in under 1 MB and have sub-second compilation times.
Since there is MicroHS Haskell compiler in 0.5 MB space nothing is stopping people to wire it together with TurboVision/ncurses. Apart from that the name is taken now.