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                  JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 31ST DECEMBER, 2014
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: As 2014 comes to a close
   DATE: Wed 31 Dec 23:28:46 GMT 2014

Another year over as the final hours of 2014 play themselves out. Soon the
phone lines will be jammed with calls to loved ones wishing them happy new
year. Fireworks will scream overhead scaring the neighbourhood cats.

The journal for this year was a little light - 40 entries compared to 57 last
year. I'll try and improve on that for 2015. As for development WolfMUD is now
minimally usable. Then again I have been considering a radical overhaul based
on the recent work I've been doing with WolfMUD-mini. Speaking of which the
mini version is now in it's fourth rewriting in about two weeks.

People still seem to be amazed that I am still working on WolfMUD after 30
years. Moving it from language to language, platform to platform. Only a few
days ago I received a very nice email in which was written:


  I'm so surprised that you constantly focused on muds for such a long time,
  and even are trying new stuffs and new programming languages on it. Please
  let me salute you.


I don't think the writer has English as their native language but they made
their point beautifully. I am touched by the fact that people still take a
moment out of their busy lives to write emails to me about WolfMUD.

I thought that someday I might write a paper - book seems too optimistic -
about what can be learned by writing a MUD. How it's possible to cover topics
such as networking, protocols, storage formats, concurrency, multi-threading,
locking, sorting, formatting and lots more in a very fun way. I know people
have already discovered this themselves, some even learnt to program for
themselves just to tinker, tweak and enhance WolfMUD.

Nearly forgot, I must say a great thanks to the Go team. If it wasn't for them
and for Go I'm not sure where WolfMUD would be right now. Probably collecting
more virtual dust. However Go came along at just the write time and had just
the features I was looking for: Simple, multi-platform and different. By
simple I mean the language itself was simple and elegant. Something Java was
until about version 1.3 or 1.4 - then it bloated and became horribly complex
and I turned away from it. I still think the O'Reilly Java books are fantastic
and still have my collection of twenty or more[1]. I also live in hope that
there might be a 'Go In A Nutshell' book.

In the next few days I plan on writing the first entry of 2015 detailing the
current state of WolfMUD-mini along with some musings on where things are at
and where they might go.

I hope you have a happy and prosperous new year!

--
Diddymus

  [1] Ironically one I don't have is 'Killer Game Programming in Java' by
      Andrew Davison - in which WolfMUD has a footnote!


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