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A-A-P

Interview with Bram Moolenaar:

Bram Moolenaar’s contributions to making your life in front of the terminal easier is well known. If you don’t recognize the name you’ll recognize his work. It’s on all modern day *nix distributions and you likely use it day in and day out. The man who brought you VIM is working on a new project to make face time with your computer that much more pleasant: A-A-P. With A-A-P’s .01 release announcement this past week OSDir.com caught up to Bram to talk about A-A-P and to see if this will be as big as VIM.

A-A-P is still very much in the beginning phase and is not recommended for production use. But, do take a look at the project site. It is an excellent portal for all the tools that can solve a programmer's daily problems. One thing that strikes me is that there are tons of tools for each problem set. Open Source philosophy encourages this, but having this happen in corporate world is a sure way to sink your money. One team would want to make it in Java, another in C, another in Zope and the list goes on.

Anyway, I’m very much interested in how A-A-P comes about. The venerable make is showing its age. Ant is well thought-out, but a pain to use - typing in XML is not the easiest or fun thing to do.

Here’s what A-A-P is envisioned to be:

A-A-P makes it easy to locate, download, build and install software. It also supports browsing source code, developing programs, managing different versions and distribution of software and documentation. This means that A-A-P is useful both for users and for developers.