
Twenty years of free software, part 1: Ikiwiki - ashitlerferad
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/twenty_years_of_free_software_--_part_1_ikiwiki/
======
ansible
I should tell my own wiki software story. It's not a free software story,
sadly.

It's 1995, and I'm working as a contractor for a large multi-national
telecommunications company. My co-workers on the 24/7 support team have been
gathering useful emails sent out by the other IT staff. They had worked on a
Perl script to assemble these text files into a single big HTML page, located
on our internal web server. When you got a new useful tidbit (such as how to
partition the disk space on this class of server), you'd have to re-run the
script to generate the new page.

Shortly after that, I learned about HTML forms, and submitting them and
generating a response. The Aha! moment occurs, and I decide to make an
interactive version of this "notes db".

450 lines of Perl later, I had something that resembled other early wikis,
with a couple notable exceptions.

It didn't occur to me to create a markup language to make writing the wiki
pages easier. You had to know some basic HTML. Links between pages were
possible, the script searched for anchor links and replaced 'NOTESDB' with the
actual server URL upon rendering a page for display.

A hierarchy was enforced. You could (and should) link between documents, but
it was expected that each page had a parent page, and could have multiple
child pages, all of which were always listed before the start of the text. The
notion of a flat namespace (as was with Ward Cunningham's wiki) was
antithetical to how I thought things should work. It is interesting to
contrast my thinking at the time to the flow of history since.

I was rather proud of that bit of code, and it was in use for years after I
had left the company. I didn't learn about other wiki software until a couple
years later.

I should have asked permission to release it as free software, but that didn't
occur to me either. I'm not much of a promoter, so I don't know that I would
have been able to build up a community around it anyway.

------
0xmohit
Part 2 of the series: Twenty years of free software -- part 2 etckeeper [1]

[1]
[http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/twenty_years_of_free_software_-...](http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/twenty_years_of_free_software_
--_part_2_etckeeper/)

------
projectramo
In comparing your 10 year post to your 20 year post, I notice that naming
conventions have become started to favor clearer names describing the function
of software.

Here was a scary part: "I stepped back because I can't write Perl very well
anymore,..."

Can you say a little about why you cannot? You've written for so long I
thought you would be even better.

~~~
joeyh
Haskell has rotted my perl brain.

~~~
0xmohit
> Haskell has rotted my perl brain.

<3

Can't help mention a talk from flatMap (Oslo) -- How Haskell is Changing my
Brain by Alissa Pajer [1]

[1] [https://vimeo.com/96639840](https://vimeo.com/96639840)

