Curl and the future of the starter kit

With the passing of Ralph Griswold, an author of SNOBOL and the ICON language, I became much more aware of the importance of archiving the history of the evolution of computing. Some of this work is actual library archive tasks (boxes of paper) and some is digital.

It is my hope that the Curl4 (which means Curl 3.0) Starter Kit will find a place first in opensource and then in a proper archive as part of the evolution of the Curl language.

In general I found that the the 3.0 Curl Starter Kit (CSK) ported easily to Curl6 (Curl 5.0) except for actually using the IPC (inter-process communication) from applet to subapplet. The biggest change between the CSK and the current Curl opensource projects is probably in the XML parsing toolset. Curl has now moved to the XML Document Model (XDM) so the code is out-dated but not uninteresting to anyone interested in programming language change. At the moment I am watching the emergence of 2 languages and a major transition in a language rather like Curl, that being REBOL which is now moving from 2.0 to 3.0. REBOL has just come through the pain of moving to UNICODE (which I think should have been what the UNICON version of the ICON language should both have meant and have accomplished) but Curl has been UNICODE since its commercial release in 2001. In the case of REBOL, we should have access eventually to the message exchanges among the key players and the language community as critical choices were made. I do not know what will be made available eventually for archive for Curl.

Every project has its challenges and perhaps Curl 4.0 was such a problem child for the Curl team. That transition deserves to have its documents preserved. The evolution to Curl 7.0 and the on-going discussion of what the Curl developer community might want to see in Curl 8.0 is part of the history of a programming language: some of its virtual documents will be preserved by the very nature of the web as was the case with internet news.

The unexpected death of the chair of CS at MIT early in the life of Curl no doubt had some impact at the time. David Kranz, the chief architect of Curl, may already have his account of the early days of the language. But in history, such reporting only constitutes another document. The Curl initiative was spun-off as a commercial enterprise at a time when opensource was just emerging. And it had been the early authors of SNOBOL at Bell Labs who may have inadvertently started the process when they placed SNOBOL in the hands of their listeners in an early public talk (at least that is the legend as I know it ...)

Yesterday I had a moment to comment to some young artists that the looms in their school had a connection with the computers in their media lab. And there, too, is a connection with the last days of Ralph Griswold: weaving and computing.