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Advisory review: attribution & lineage correction (credit Norman Nunley) - #7

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Advisory review: attribution & lineage correction (credit Norman Nunley)#7
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@mparrett mparrett commented Jul 22, 2026

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Advisory PR — review only, do not merge. Per the convention from #1/#5/#6, the base branch pre-attribution is deliberately frozen at the phase-start commit (6ec51d0) so this phase reads as one diff. Merging would fast-forward the pin and destroy the "before" snapshot. Close after review.

What this corrects

Feedback from Norman Nunley, the project's creator: the tour didn't credit him at all, and the docs framed this project as a faithful revival of "FMPL, created in 1992 by Jon Blow." In fact this FMPL is based only on an EBNF Norman extracted from the original FMPL sources in the late 1990s, and its syntax is only lightly similar to the original.

Every lineage surface now says: this FMPL is Norman Nunley's — a descendant of the 1992 original seeded from his late-90s EBNF, not a restoration of it.

  • Tour + landing deks — lead with "Norman Nunley's streaming-first language…, grown in Rust from the grammar of a 1992 MUD-server language"
  • Tour §1 — new credit paragraph: EBNF provenance, the lightly-similar caveat, and the first-hand MUD lineage (co-author of cool++, the C++ rewrite of Stephen White's CoolMUD; White created MOO, LambdaMOO's ancestor)
  • Rehab log — names Norman as the one who set up and steered the "ralph" agent loop; field log 2 names him as the reviewer behind the IndexedDB-image direction
  • README / DEV.md / project.md — lineage sections rewritten; timeline gains "Late 1990s: Nunley extracts an EBNF from the original sources"
  • fmpl.ebnf — provenance header (descends from that extraction, since extended)
  • Landing footer — "created by Norman Nunley, Jr."

The 1992 half of the story keeps its sourcing: FOLDOC's Frobozz Magic Programming Language entry credits Jon Blow with the original interpreter at UC Berkeley's XCF.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code


Superseded in part. The MUD-lineage line above — "co-author of cool++, the C++ rewrite of Stephen White's CoolMUD" — is the version @nnunley corrected in his comment on this PR:

I was one of the devs for cool++/coldmud. ColdStore is a better reference for what I was doing then.

The body above is left as written, since it's the draft he was responding to. The corrected text is on main and in nnunley#6.

…EADME

Per feedback from the project's creator: this FMPL descends from an EBNF
he extracted from the original FMPL sources in the late 1990s, and its
syntax is only lightly similar to the 1992 original. The docs previously
framed the project as a faithful revival of "FMPL, created in 1992 by
Jon Blow" with no mention of Nunley.

- Tour/landing deks: lead with Nunley; "grown from the grammar of" a
  1992 MUD-server language, not "revived"
- Tour §1: new credit paragraph — EBNF provenance, lightly-similar
  caveat, cool++/CoolMUD lineage (Stephen White -> MOO -> LambdaMOO)
- Rehab log: names Nunley as the one who set up and steered "ralph";
  field log: names him as the reviewer behind the IndexedDB direction
- README/DEV/project.md: lineage rewritten, late-90s extraction added
  to the timeline
- fmpl.ebnf: provenance header

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@nnunley

nnunley commented Jul 22, 2026

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I was one of the devs for cool++/coldmud. ColdStore is a better reference for what I was doing then.

…ring

The rehab wasn't "by hand": it was a couple dozen prompts from a human
steering Claude over a few hours — the same mode the codebase was built in.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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