From: James Higgins (jameshiggins@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Jul 30 2001 - 19:10:28 MDT
At 05:44 PM 7/30/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>James Higgins wrote:
> >
> > At 12:44 PM 7/30/2001 -0400, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> > >James Higgins wrote:
> > > >
> > > > That is a very different case than yours. Linux, like virtually
> operating
> > > > system, is a huge collection of separate projects... I hope you haven't
> > > > been using Linux as an open-source template for Flare, because I
> believe
> > > > they are far more different than similar.
> > >
> > >The analogy would be to Guido van Rossum or Larry Wall, of course.
> > >(Python and Perl respectively.)
> >
> > Right, and I seem to remember someone on this list mentioning that Python
> > has been in development 15 years. And I know Perl has been around a long
> > time as well.
> >
>
>True, however the first versions of both languages took less than a year
>of development by basically one person AFAIK. I can remember back to the
>early 90s when perl 4 became popular. It seems to me that after the first
>2-3 years the rest of the time is spent tacking on little bits and pieces
>and tweaking. For instance here is the timeline of Perl:
>
>http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html
>
>version 1.0 at end of 1987, 2.0 in middle of 1988, 3.0 in Oct. 1989, 4.0
>in March 1991.
I'm not really up on Perl or Python history, so I just spent about an hour
looking into it.
Perl:
1) It sounds like Larry had help from several people on the original
versions of Pearl.
2) Perl 0 took 9 months, but was very simplistic
3) Perl 1 was released in 1987, not certain how much effort came between 0
and 1 or even if they are the same
4) Perl 1 was very simplistic, it looks like Perl 3 is more at the level
Flare will need to be at even for simple AI work
5) Perl 3 was released in Oct, 1989. Which gives at least about 3 years
from the start to a reasonably capable implementation
Python
1) The original version of Python was created in about one year
2) Guido van Rossum had extensive experience with language design &
development from the company he worked for
3) Python was very similar to the language he already had experience working on
4) I didn't find documentation on what was in version 1 of Python, so it
may not have been at a comparable state
Assuming I have my facts straight, this should help answer some
questions. It took Perl about 3 years to arrive at a point where I believe
it would be comparable to a useful implementation of Flare. The first year
had a couple of people working on the, the second two it was open
source. Version 1 of Python took about a year and may have been comparable
to the useful implementation of Flare. The creator of Python had extensive
experience in language development & implementation, which is what made
this possible.
If I got any of this wrong, please let me know. Thanks.
James Higgins
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