At 10:35 AM -0500 3/6/03, Quinn wrote:
Robert Sanderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Thu 06-Mar-2003 15:08:36:
> I'm all for advancing the language, but there are enough
> high level languages out there. We don't need another one,
> as much as I like MOO. Effort should go towards updating
> the server we have, for example inclusion of Lao Tzu's
> unicode patch, among others, and a distribution of 1.8.2.
It really doesn't matter, unless he would have putting his
efforts towards an official new server release.
Why haven't we had a new server release? Aren't there many
patches worthy of being included? What about WAIFs? Unicode?
Did SSL fall by the wayside? Fileutils?
Is there anyone out there who has the skill, time, and desire
to actually produce new LambdaMOO server releases?
At sourceforce there is a project called 'lily', which is just
a chat system that happens to use lambdaMOO (ie, lambdaMOO does
much more we really need, but one of the early guys on lily
happened to work down the hall from Pavel Curtis @Xerox, and
we really liked the ideas in lambdaMOO so we went with that).
Either at the lily project, or some pointer off of it, is a
version of lambdaMOO plus several of the most-useful patches
that had been floating around at the last time we (lily) did
a lot of development work. This included patches as obviously
useful and (one would think) uncontroversial as updating it to
work with the latest version of autoconf. I tried to drum up
interest in that, but very very few people outside of the small
lily community seemed to care. So, my version never got beyond
the lily distribution.
A few months ago, Eli Levy contacted me. He was going to take
the lambdaMOO project and start a new project called EmeraldMOO.
He seems to have a bit more ambition than I did with my changes
for lambdaMOO, but as far as I can tell most people also ignored
his project.
ASIDE: The version of lambdaMOO that I put together for lily
does include the SSL update, because we are very interested in
having encrypted connections. However, I had a subtle bug in
the version I made available, and the SSL part does not really
get compiled in. Once you fix that subtle bug (which is a
problem with the order files are #include'd, iirc), you'll find
that there is at least one real bug left in that SSL support,
which is that the moo-based server will lock up when it goes to
do a checkpoint.
I kept telling Eli that once I figured that bug out, I'd look
into switching lily over to emeraldMOO (and switching all my
lambdaMOO updates to EmeraldMOO), as Eli did seem much more
active and enthusiastic than the lambdaMOO community has been.
However, I am also busy on other coding projects, so I haven't
gotten back to this. In the meantime, we supply encrypted
connections to lily-users via stunnel. A lame solution, but
it works OK and it isolates us from changes in OpenSSL.
I'll also note that the very small community of lily developers
has sometimes mulled over the idea of completely dropping MOO,
and rewriting lily in something like Java or Ruby. The main
attraction to that is there are a lot more people interested in
Java or Ruby (as languages) than there are in learning MOO. One
of the problems for lily-development is how few people either
know or want to learn the MOO language.
That said, I see no reason to get excited about extending
lambdaMOO as a language, and giving it a life of it's own
outside of the MOO-environment. There are many comp languages
which already exist, and I don't see how lambdaMOO really adds
anything noteworthy to the languages that already exist (except
for in the environment that it was originally designed for, of
course).
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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