World's Shortest P2P App: 15 Lines

soren.harward writes "The New Scientist has an article about TinyP2P, the world's smallest P2P app. It's 15 lines of Python code brought to us by Edward Felten, CS Professor at Princeton and outspoken supporter of the digital rights the Slashdot community holds so dear. He wrote the program as a proof-of-concept that P2P apps are really easy to write, don't have to be complicated, and thus banning them (a la the INDUCE Act) is pointless and silly."

Comments

Re:Reported last month

[thrift24]

Molestar uses a very loose defintion of "lines". A line in perl is ussually where the ; is, which in readable code should be at the end of the actual line. I counted 5 ;'s in the first line of Molestar with a briefscan. A brief estimation would tell us Molestar is more like 30 actuall lines. (I don't see why Molestar doesn't just claim to be one line as all of this code, could work just fine in 1 "line" as they define.) I've never used Python before, but I would imagine by looking at the code to TinyP2P that python's lines truely end at the end of the line. So as far as line count is concerned TinyP2P is around half the size as Molestar.

Interesting implementations

[jd]

One of the best-publicised (amongst the geek community) protests against the ITAR regulations on encryption was the DES encryption algorithm on a t-shirt. What would be really cool, though, would be to have a P2P on a t-shirt and then have a CCD-based device that could "run" it when you walked into the room. "Me? No, I never loaded the computer with that."

Of course, there are other interesting implementations out there. IIRC, there used to be a web server that was written entirely in Postscript. Although not written in Postscript, one of the early rivals to X - InterViews - used Postscript as the graphics language.

The winner of the 50th Anniversary of the Manchester Mk. 1 programming contest was a program written in something like 20 words of assembly a programmable timer for chicken soup. (When you consider that the assembly language for the MM1 had 8 instructions, no add operation, and no real-time clock, that's not bad going.)

Perl golf goes by the byte

[tepples]

Machine language, the bytecode form of assembly language that microprocessors interpret, doesn't really have "lines" either. The point isn't that MoleSter is 6 lines as much as it is 466 bytes, and programming golf rules state that a lower score in bytes is better.