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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to be critical, especially here, but here are a few thoughts:

- Your DSL is really obscure. The syntax needs a cleanup, or it needs a lot more examples in the documentation showing how to generate useful content from this.

- Names are important. This wasn't a good choice; I'm just going to leave it at that.

- It would be really useful to preface the documentation getting started guide with something like: Here's an example of a problem this solves that other tools don't solve, or that is difficult to do with other tools. Here's a comparison of other similar tools and how it's more difficult to do blah with them.

Templating languages are a dime a dozen, and if you write a new one, no one will care.

...but this isn't really a templating language; it's a procedural content generator using a DSL.

I think you could do a lot of interesting things with the ideas in this, but it needs to be explained clearly.

Hope that's helpful. :)

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Hey, thanks for the comment.

You're right about the classification of the language. I'm not fully versed in the different terms for these things, so I went with what made the most sense at the time. I can see how that would be confusing to people.

The name is something of a joke. The idea for the language began with a random story generator, so it seemed like a good idea to name the language something that reflected the comical nature of the output (without being blatantly vulgar). I understand why that might be a less-than-ideal name in a professional environment. But it grabs your attention, so there's that.

Your point about providing comparisons between identical code in MH and other languages is a good one. I'll look into adding a few of those. I do understand that it is imperative to distinguish one's product from the rest. This would help that greatly.

I'll work on adding more examples throughout the docs to clarify how the language is meant to be used. Every design decision relating to the syntax was done for a reason. Many people who worked with MH thought it was a bit hard at first, but they quickly got used to it and found it fun to work with. I'm pretty optimistic.

You should worry more about the attention you're going to attract from that name. I'll re-iterate the above comment that its really a bad choice.

Naming things is one of the hardest problems period.

The naming problem is felt by all, but programmers really feel it. Go ask any parent how long they deliberated on their childs name.

I recently had a very difficult time describing a project that I'm working on with a coworker because of its name. After much discussion we realized we were both on the same page; but the name really threw them off. I am continuing work on the project, but also considering a new name. (though I can take a while to change the projects name as it shouldn't offend anybody)

For reference: Go do some cursory searches around 'misogyny in tech'

Lastly; here is another project with a similar name. You can see the result when this hit front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268

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