Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wcerfgba 1929 days ago
What's the origin of the name? 'Lunatic' is an antiquated and ableist term for the mentally ill, so probably not the best name for your product/company.
2 comments

I was originally working on a programming language that compiled to Lua, so I named it Lunatic. Later I decided to write a runtime for the language and called it Lunatic VM. We ended up with an actor-based language-agnostic runtime, but the original name was kept though it does not have any connections to Lua anymore.
The mentally ill meaning is not much used anymore. The #2 meaning at https://www.dictionary.com/browse/lunatic is the default unless context implies otherwise.