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Defending the Python lanuage...

Karl M. Syring syring at email.com
Sun Feb 3 05:16:52 EST 2002 
"Kragen Sitaker" <kragen at pobox.com> schrieb
> "Tim Peters" <tim.one at home.com> writes:
> > Open source *is* like that, to the extent that free support is
> > relatively easy to get for as long as people like it enough to work on
it,
> > and even after that support for hire remains a possibility forever.
Would
> > that it were so for my copy of, e.g., Macsyma.
>
> One version of Macsyma is now open source:
> http://www.ma.utexas.edu/maxima.html

It is at http://maxima.sourceforge.net/, because it's original maintainer
died.

>
> > Software bascially sucks, and you've got to come to terms with that.
The
> > reality is that no software you write is going to have a useful lifetime
> > spanning even a decade without continual rewriting.
>
> I sure wish some parts of TeX, Emacs, Xlib, and CMUCL had been
> rewritten sometime in the last decade.  But they haven't, and I still
> manage to use them somehow...

There is a rewite of TeX called NTS (http://nts.tug.org/) written in, uhm,
Java. With the native compilers galore, it may get a breeze of new life.

Karl M. Syring
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