Thursday, February 8th, 2018

	On gopher clients
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Before I  begin  with  the  topic, I'd  like to  thank you for all the
replies, you sent either via e-mail or as post on your  phlogs. I just
wanted to know  whether is it  worth it to keep alive old  dinosaur in
this new mammal world, but it seems that there is enough  interest for
dinosaur  ride, so  there will be one.  Bongusta is  going to stay and
even get  those  improvements I  mentioned last month - I will do some
gophermap parsing before hash calculation to eliminate false positives
on SDF - and try to roll them out during weekend. 

And now on gopher  clients. There's quite a buzz through  phlogosphere
about a new gopher client VF-1  created by  Solderpunk[1]. It seems to
be a great tool and  people are  really happy about it as far as I can
say from the  recent phlog posts. But as I  already said, I'm a deeply
weird person, so I'm sticking with lynx. 

Let me elaborate: 

Several years ago there were about ten  active  people on  gopherspace
and  half of  them  developed  their own  gopher  server. I was  never
interested in  that  kind  of  thing,  because I  was  satisfied  with
Gophernicus  from the  first  moment and  when new  release of  CentOS
prevented me to run it on my virtual server, I  switched to  Motsognir
which is behind this gopher site to this day. So when everybody talked
about their own  servers, I  started to write a  client. I used Perl +
WxWidgets and even  released some alpha version for few  friends. Then
my  employer sent me to an  enhanced C#/.NET course and I wrote a .NET
client as a  project there. And then I  started  thinking: Am I really
trying to  create  a client for simple plain-text  protocol that needs
a huge bloated virtual machine / JITter (.NET) or full-blown scripting
language interpreter (Perl) to run? What's the point of it? 

That's where my development stopped and both code folders haven't been
touched since. Gopher indeed is a simple  protocol and it was  created
simple on  purpose - to be  accessed with simple  tools,  requiring as
little  computing  resources  as  possible.  Today  and  with  today's
computers it  probably  doesn't  matter for  anyone  else than me, but
anything written in Perl / .NET / etc. couldn't even run on  computers
they had on mind in 1992 when they put phrase "slow,  smaller  desktop
computers" in RFC 1436. Lynx can. 

Lynx is not just another  web browser with gopher  capabilities.  It's
a gopher client right from the start and  WWW-rendering was added some
time later. I can run some  version of lynx on anything  starting with
68k-based  Amiga  or  Macintosh  with  just  megabytes of  RAM, up  to
latest and greatest Intel Core machines. That's  why I  use  it  since
I rediscovered gopher in 2010 and even OverbiteFF was always my backup
option, not the first one.

But, of course, that is just description of my humble personal reality
and nobody should follow. Especially not Solderpunk. 

[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/introducing-vf1.txt 

.