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Comment by hxugufjfjf | Hacker News Reader

It’s a joke. Nobody would fork an entire programming language and maintain it because they thought someone was wrong on The Internet.

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Projects have forked over leadership issues plenty of times before; there have been cases where both parts of the fork stuck around (NetBSD/FreeBSD), and at least a couple where the projects' former leadership effectively gave up and handed the reins to the fork (egcs, a gcc fork which became the official gcc in 1999, after the FSF belatedly realized that their official version was getting stagnant, and X.org, which displaced XFree86 without a rename after users of the latter all abandoned it).

Also openoffice/libreoffice, bitcoin cash from bitcoin, etc.

> NetBSD/FreeBSD

Bit of a nitpick, but I think you meant NetBSD/OpenBSD? AFAIK both FreeBSD and NetBSD independently continued the abandoned 386BSD project, but there was never any strong relation between the two projects (they did share code later on). OpenBSD did split from NetBSD, after Theo de Raadt was removed.

Other examples: FreeBSD/DragonFlyBSD, Vim/NeoVim, Mplayer/mpv, (Open)Solaris/illumos, MySQL/MariaDB, probably some more.

You sure about that?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27309412/what-is-the-dif...

I stand corrected.

But, a few months later io.js merged back with node. So, “it worked,” but was a giant mess.

There's also libav which forked from ffmpeg and lasted for 7 years. And Gitea which forked from Gogs and it's still going.

There are loads of forks that happen due to disagreements in organisation.

It's also happened with operating systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD

> Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the techniques adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5 would lead to poor performance and maintenance problems. He sought to correct these anticipated problems within the FreeBSD project. Due to conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, his ability to directly change the codebase was eventually revoked.

People have forked terminal emulators, desktop environments, and operating systems; so forking a programming language isn't that inconceivable. (-:

> forking a programming language isn't that inconceivable.

Do SQL dialects in Databases count? mariadb

If I remember it right, the word "fork" was created to describe the GCC thing.

The wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development) has a link to a usenet post from 1995 that uses 'fork' to describe XEmacs; so that predates the gcc/egcs split by a couple of years.

What if that "wrong person" had undue influence on the project?

Python 2. Don’t make me print(“”) when I can print “”

XEmacs

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