Twisted Network Programming Essentials, 2nd Edition

Foreword to the First Edition

“My name is Ozymandius, king of kings: Look on my words, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

—Percy Bysshe Shelly, “Ozymandius”

As the Twisted project’s originator and nominal leader—and as someone who is not being paid for writing this—I can very honestly say that this is a fine book, and it has made me proud of what I’ve started. You now hold in your hands a wondrous key that contains the knowledge to unlock a very powerful software system—a software system borne of a consistent, methodical vision; a vision half a decade in realization and hundreds of man-years in implementation; a vision for a video game that has yet to be written, called “Divunal.”

I have been lauded many times for my role in Twisted’s creation, and in this foreword I will attempt to disabuse you of the notion that any of it was on purpose. Not only was it an accident, but neither I, nor anyone else, has made one iota of progress towards my original goal of writing a game.

When I was eight years old, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I was going to write video games just like my favorite ones, the text-based games from Infocom. They were like books, but better. I knew how to write already—at a fourth-grade level, or so I’m told—and all I needed to figure out was the part where the computer wrote back. Lucky for you nobody thought to tell me how hard that step between ...