Answer to "What ever happened to Sabrina?" [0226.2000]

Someone asked me today why I abandoned Sabrina. Here's the story:

On Sat, 26 Feb 2000, John Nolan wrote:
>
> > there's my long-abandoned "sabrina" project at:
> >
> > http://www.manifestation.com/sabrina/
>
>
> Why was it abandoned?  Just curious.  I'm guessing that
> you just moved on to other, more interesting projects.

Mostly:

• I ran out of free time.. :)
• I discovered Python (heresy, i know...)

I expect that someday in the next year or two I'll pick it up again and start re-implementing it in Python. Among other reasons, that way means my users can actually play with it online as an applet...

> Did you finish all the things that you wanted to accomplish with it?

No, not at all... But it can do some cool stuff like connect to the IRC..

I got sidetracked when I tried getting it to talk to multiple people at once.. At the time, perl's threading capabilities didn't exist (at least AFAIK), and so I tried making a virtual machine that would do her threading, which lead to my "GVM" package (also abandoned), which lead to the whole thing getting way off course and taking way too much time. :)

The idea was (and still is) to actually do useful therapy/brainstorming/etc which would be really really hard except for a few oddball "content free" methodologies like Rogerian psychotherapy (Eliza) or NLP (Sabrina).. And as far as reaching that goal, Sabrina as a program and I as a programmer fell way short. :)

The other idea was to win the Loebner prize, and that didn't happen either. :)