Post: What happened to the original Software Carpentry?

content/post/2016-08-swc-archaeology.md

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+---
+title: 'What happened to the original Software Carpentry?'
+description: |
+  Before @softwarecarpentry, there was Software Carpentry.
+  What happened to it?
+slug: swc-the-competition
+date: 2016-08-16T18:03:13+01:00
+draft: false
+type: post
+tags:
+- Software Carpentry
+- Web archaeology
+- Technology
+---
+
+> "Software Carpentry was originally a competition to design new software tools,
+> not a training course.
+> The fact that you didn't know that tells you how well it worked."
+
+When I read this in a [recent post on Greg Wilson's blog][gvwilson blog],
+I took it as a challenge.
+I actually do remember the competition,
+although looking at the dates it was long over by the time I found it.
+
+I believe it did have impact;
+in fact, I still occasionally use one of the tools it produced,
+so Greg's comment got me thinking:
+what happened to the other competition entries?
+
+Working out what happened will need a bit of digging,
+as most of the relevant information
+is now [only available on the Internet Archive][SWC Archive].
+It certainly seems that by November 2008
+the domain name had been allowed to lapse
+and had been replaced with a holding page by the registrar.
+
+There were four categories in the competition,
+each representing a category of tool
+that the organisers thought could be improved:
+
+- SC Build: a build tool to replace [make][]
+- SC Conf: a configuration management tool to replace [autoconf][] and [automake][]
+- SC Track: a bug tracking tool
+- SC Test: an easy to use testing framework
+
+I'm hoping to be able to show that this work
+had a lot more impact than Greg is admitting here.
+I'll keep you posted on what I find!
+
+[gvwilson blog]: http://third-bit.com/2015/12/06/just-keep-swimming.html
+[SWC Archive]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071014042716/http://software-carpentry.com/index.html
+[make]: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/
+[autoconf]: https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/autoconf.html
+[automake]: https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/