1/ My Toolkit, part 3:
Vim, the text editor.
Bram Moolenaar wrote it in the Netherlands and released it in 1991. He maintained it for over 30 years until he died in 2023. A community of volunteers carries it on.
@peterdalmaris.wsocial.eu
@peterdalmaris.wsocial.eu1/ My Toolkit, part 3:
Vim, the text editor.
Bram Moolenaar wrote it in the Netherlands and released it in 1991. He maintained it for over 30 years until he died in 2023. A community of volunteers carries it on.
@peterdalmaris.wsocial.eu3/ That (..an elected steering council..) matters. A language this much of the world depends on isn't owned by a company that can change the rules overnight. It's a public good that began in a publicly funded European lab, and it's governed in the open. peps.python.org/pep-0013/
@peterdalmaris.wsocial.eu2/ I use Python every day: AI agents, data processing, web apps, and MicroPython on microcontrollers.
Most of what I automate in my business is with Python. Since 2019 the language has been led by a steering council elected by its core developers.
In the photo is Guido.
@peterdalmaris.wsocial.eu1/ My Toolkit, part 2: Python.
Guido van Rossum started it over Christmas 1989 at CWI, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam.
It's now dominating the programming world, and the default language of AI work.
@peterdalmaris.wsocial.eu1/ My toolkit, part 1:
Linux.
In 1991 Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki, announced he was writing a free operating system as a hobby.
Today Linux runs all of the world's top 500 supercomputers, most of the cloud, and every Android phone.
@peterdalmaris.wsocial.eu3/ I found that a lot of my toolkit is European, Canadian and Australian, and that almost none of it was built by one country alone.
After the toolkit, I'm planning a second series to follow hardware through the democratic supply chain.
Feel free to share your perspectives.
@peterdalmaris.wsocial.eu2/ There’s a third reason.
With geopolitics as unsettled as it is, I wanted to test my belief that democracies are still the world’s most innovative and scientifically productive societies.
Tracing my tools back to their source seems like a good way to check.
@peterdalmaris.wsocial.eu1/ Starting Monday, a series on the tools I use every day, one per post: where each came from, who started it, and how I use it.
Two reasons motivated me to do this:
1. People often ask what’s in my toolkit, and
2. I realised I didn’t know the origin story of most of it.
