MIXAL is dead
<p>I terminated one of my open-source projects today.  MIXAL is dead; it has been replaced by the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/mdk/">GNU MIX Development Kit</a>, alias MDK.  Open-source projects die so seldom that the circumstances deserve a minor note.</p>
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<p>I didn&#8217;t actually write MIXAL; somebody named &#8216;Darius Bacon&#8217; (probably <a href="http://wry.me/blog/">this guy</a>) did it, under DOS.  I stumbled across it in 1998, ported it to Unix, and fixed some minor bugs.  Later, when I was in semi-regular contact with Don Knuth, he contributed two of his test programs and a text description of MIX from <cite>The Art of Computer Programming</cite>.  Don gets open source; he was careful to arrange with his publisher terms that allow this material to be redistributed not just by me but by any project shipping under an open-source license.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not sure when the MDK project started. When I first ran across it, it seemed to me to be not as capable as MIXAL; I made a note of it in my README file but did not consider simply handing off to it.  That might have been as much a decade ago; when I re-encountered it recently, it looked a great deal more polished and mature.  I, on the other hand, had barely touched MIXAL since I first ported it.</p>
<p>The world needs one competently-written MIX interpreter, but it doesn&#8217;t need two. So I looked up MDK&#8217;s maintainer and negotiated a handoff; he got the material Don Knuth donated to MIXAL, and I got to put MIXAL to a tidy end.</p>
<p>This what the open-source version of what musicologists call &#8220;folk process&#8221; looks like. Re-use, improve, contribute &#8211; and when someone else is clearly doing a better job, let go.</p>
