Mooix is my second try at writing a moo. It turned out a lot better than perlmoo. The idea in mooix was that users would be able to program the moo on the fly in any programming language and that objects would be composed of methods written in any combination of languages. Of course this would be done securely using some fun tricks. Oh, and it would have some pretty sophisticated natural language parsing that could understand sentences more complex than the pidgin English most moos accept. It was a lot of work but I accomplished all that.

The language independence appealed to lots of people who had been looking for that in a moo, and mooix had more early contributions from other developers than a lot of projects I'd worked on before. Things were really intense for a while, I remember several months where that's all I did.

I stopped working on the project ater a few years of doing lots of work, since I had to get back involved in the Debian installer. Like with perlmoo I dropped the moo for something a bit more serious. I did promise that I would return eventually, a promise I have so far not kept..

Looking back at it, mooix was hobbled by the security system, which ended up being so secure it was hard to do many useful things and also (along with the parser) slowed it down quite a lot. Security problems with the linux kernel also became more of an issue than I'd expected. Another weak area was the object system, it seems that designing such a large object oriented system is a bit beyond me.

I'm pretty sure that I won't return to working on mooix in its current form. And while MOOs in general are still an interesting area for me, I'm more interested now in doing similar things in a more distributed fashion, which is a much harder problem to solve. Maybe one of these days.

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