Why “Lykn”?
Lichen is not a single organism. It is a symbiosis — a fungus and an alga (and more), wrapped so intimately around each other that for centuries botanists classified the composite as one thing. The fungus provides structure: a scaffolding that anchors to rock, bark, or soil, protecting the partnership from desiccation and ultraviolet light. The alga provides energy: photosynthesis, the conversion of light to sugar, the metabolic engine that keeps the whole arrangement alive. Neither thrives alone. Together, they colonize environments that would defeat either partner — arctic tundra, volcanic rock, the exposed faces of desert cliffs.
Lykn is three languages in symbiosis. The kernel (2) provides structure: a stable, thin mapping to JavaScript’s AST (1) that generates clean output and handles the mechanical business of code generation. The surface (3) provides safety: type annotations, immutable bindings, exhaustive pattern matching, contracts. Neither layer needs to understand the other’s domain. Altogether, they provide something that neither JavaScript alone (structure without safety) nor a standalone type system alone (safety without structure) can achieve.
The project’s logo, as well as the book’s cover, is taken from the lichen series of paintings of Vigdís Ljósadóttir — intricate, organic forms that emerge from the interplay of structure and colour, much as Lykn’s behaviour emerges from the interplay of kernel, surface, and JavaScript. It seemed appropriate. Lichens are among the oldest living things on earth. Lisps are among the oldest living languages in computing. Both persist by being, at their core, an elegant answer to the question of how a handful of very different things can become one thing that is greater than either.
Additionally and tangentially, the name was inspired via one of the Rust-based tools that had been selected even before the language took shape: biome. The chain of thought being roughly: what’s a tiny part of any given biome and is simultaneously an absolute incomprehesible chimera? At that point, there was no other choice. It had to be “Lichen.” It just needed a morphological makeover.
It turns out there are cognates in other languages for its post-makeover form: lykn means “luck” in Swedish, “good luck” in Norwegian, and — if you squint at the Icelandic with the right sort of imagination — “closure”. But names, like parentheses, accrete meaning beyond their etymology.