I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. Several of the things that made the code funny/fun to read seem to have been dropped in favor of making this a more officially workable language. While I'm all for having it be workable, we need to balance it with the LOLness, or it loses the whole thing that makes it attractive.

When I read code that's written in proposed-LOLcat, it reads like a LOLcat pic and it's FUNNY.

When I read code that's written in v1.0, it's drab. At that point, I'd rather write in Perl or Python.

I would like to see the owner of this site take control of the language and guide it in its LOLcatness. Take contributions, but make decisions and guide it in the direction you want it to take.

Democracy is all right, but when a person has a vision, a dictatorship works better.

That's my 2c. — Risser, 2007/05/31 11:44

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What specifically is less funny now than it was? Very few things have actually changed a lot, most of it has just been defined more specifically.

— Marius, 2007/05/31 12:17

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There is a decent point to be made that if you just include any old text from any old image macro then you'll lose the essence of what makes up lolcat grammar. For instance the cockmongler example http://lolcode.com/contributions/cockmongler

— danb, 2007/05/31 12:30

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Okay, I was thinking about this, and here's an example. There have been at least 3 block-closing suggestions. IM OUTTA YR LOOP for loops, SRSLY for O RLY IZ ifs, and of course KTHX for other blocks. In the recommendation, this has been reduced to just KTHX.

Grammatically, it makes sense to make KTHX be the single block-closing signal. But LOLcat-wise, having different block closers for each type of block makes the code read better.

Another example is taking the O RLY off the front of the if statement. Unneeded, but it makes the code read better.

I think, anyway. — Risser, 2007/05/31 16:08

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I think I have to aggree with Risser on those points. Sure, it takes a few extra cycles to parse “I'M OUTTA UR” than “KTHX”, but one of the things cool about “I'M OUTTA YR” is that it had a matching loop label to “IM'M IN UR”, allowing for the possibility of matching the start and the end of the block, so that you made sure you were closing the right loop. Although, since this was only present in loops, it is kind of odd if that's the only type of block that supports labels in that way.

Same with the ORLY. It takes a bit longer to parse, but I think adds to the humor of the language.

Another thing that has changed with recommendation 1.0 is that you can no longer start a generic block for no reason. For example, in C, I can do this:

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
	//this is some code
	{
		//this is some code too
	}
}

Now, you don't see that a lot, and it's not very useful unless you want to shadow a variable or restrict it to a specific part of the code.

— Michael Buckley, 2007/05/31 17:08

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I agree. LOLCODE is getting less funny. We need to preserve teh funneh!!1

How can we have a YARLY with no ORLY? It's just wrong.

Also, as the language is defined, it seems to be looking more and more like a regular old language like C. I think LOLCODE should be unconventional yet useful. For example, I thought the named loops were a great way to have named breaks! And why limit arrays to positive int indexes? It's not hard to allow string indexes and is much more lolcat-ish, i.e. NERF FISH IN MAH BUKKIT!!

Also, compare:

I HAS A NOOB ITZ "CANT HAS APP.CONF!!1"
DIAF 1 NOOB

I HAS A NOOB ITZ "CANT HAS APP.CONF!!1"
DIE IN A FIRE!!1 NOOB

— J Moore Wilson, 2007/05/31 18:20

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I didn't have any trouble writing a cursory parser that allowed spaces in tokens. I think that's key to the LOLness.

As for arrays, why arrays? Why not a dictionary/map? If you don't do iterators, then there's not much difference between a[1] and a[“1”], a[2] and a[“2”]. You just wouldn't know what the first and last item were. Hmmm. I like the uber-flexibility of it, and it allows for some LOL niceness for sure. — Risser, 2007/05/31 19:07

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I guess a lot depends upon what, exactly, this language is going to be.

Personally, the immediate appeal to me upon reading the first examples was that the language was at once clear and funny. It seemed like a perfect successor to BASIC as an intro language. (WTF/OMG makes more sense at a glance than any other CASE switch I've seen. )

Also, there seems to be more 1337speak creeping in that could stand to be more Lolish. (DIAF?)

— Church Tucker, 2007/05/31 20:14