Oils – Reviewing Our NLnet Grants After 4 Years
5 hours ago
- #Project Management
- #Shell Development
- #Open Source
- The Oils project received four NLnet grants, helping advance OSH (POSIX-compatible shell) and YSH (new language) development, but the fourth grant ended early due to personal time constraints and backlog.
- Progress plots showed OSH's Python-to-C++ translation completed by early 2023, accelerating development, and YSH also made gains, indicating the funding was effective.
- Despite meeting grant goals, the 'upgrade path from bash' framing seems less realistic now due to the extensive effort required for distros, though ambitious project goals like compressing domain-specific languages remain.
- The project struggled with parallel progress on OSH and YSH, limited contributors for YSH, and the overall scope being too large for the FOSS model, leading to a pause in active development.
- LLMs like Claude aided learning tools like SQL and VimScript for project tasks, reflecting broader observations on software infrastructure and design debt.