{"id":4852,"date":"2013-02-25T17:07:02","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T22:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4852"},"modified":"2014-03-09T19:53:04","modified_gmt":"2014-03-09T23:53:04","slug":"mixal-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4852","title":{"rendered":"MIXAL is dead"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I terminated one of my open-source projects today.  MIXAL is dead; it has been replaced by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/software\/mdk\/\">GNU MIX Development Kit<\/a>, alias MDK.  Open-source projects die so seldom that the circumstances deserve a minor note.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t actually write MIXAL; somebody named &#8216;Darius Bacon&#8217; (probably <a href=\"http:\/\/wry.me\/blog\/\">this guy<\/a>) did it, under DOS.  I stumbled across it in 1998, ported it to Unix, and fixed some minor bugs.  Later, when I was in semi-regular contact with Don Knuth, he contributed two of his test programs and a text description of MIX from <cite>The Art of Computer Programming<\/cite>.  Don gets open source; he was careful to arrange with his publisher terms that allow this material to be redistributed not just by me but by any project shipping under an open-source license.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure when the MDK project started. When I first ran across it, it seemed to me to be not as capable as MIXAL; I made a note of it in my README file but did not consider simply handing off to it.  That might have been as much a decade ago; when I re-encountered it recently, it looked a great deal more polished and mature.  I, on the other hand, had barely touched MIXAL since I first ported it.<\/p>\n<p>The world needs one competently-written MIX interpreter, but it doesn&#8217;t need two. So I looked up MDK&#8217;s maintainer and negotiated a handoff; he got the material Don Knuth donated to MIXAL, and I got to put MIXAL to a tidy end.<\/p>\n<p>This what the open-source version of what musicologists call &#8220;folk process&#8221; looks like. Re-use, improve, contribute &#8211; and when someone else is clearly doing a better job, let go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I terminated one of my open-source projects today. MIXAL is dead; it has been replaced by the GNU MIX Development Kit, alias MDK. Open-source projects die so seldom that the circumstances deserve a minor note.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-4852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-open-source","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4852"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5328,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4852\/revisions\/5328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}