The history of the Powtils project is not great, and not funny. It started out as PSP (pascal server pages) and was hosted on a strange site called Furtopia.
I was researching CGI in about 2003-2004, and every website seemed to mention Perl in some way or another, so many of us made the common misconception that Perl was CGI, or that in order to use CGI, you basically used Perl. Somehow I managed to land on Pascal Server Pages which claimed to be a freepascal CGI tool. CGI without perl. Wonderful. Why was the site hosted on "furtopia" and did that have anything to do with the Frutopia drink?
Many years later I discovered Furtopia seemed to be a place where animal furfags (people who like to hump dogs and donkeys) hung out together and drew pictures of retarded looking human/dog combos (dogs and humans and other animals have sex with each other to create combination "furry" beings). Hence "furtopia". A trip down Memory Lane and don't bother going here. The developer of "PSP" had nothing to do with Furtopia drawings and humpings itself, he was just hosted on their servers, which I'll take his word for.
At first I thought this furtopia site was just a picture drawing website for creative people to draw interesting animals that had human features, or vice versa. Then after searching Usenet history for the founder of furtopia project I found some posts where he was talking about wanting to cum in a dog, or something similar (I'm not joking either). The PSP developer wasn't related to the furtopia owner, psp just happened to be hosted on that domain name. All this was discovered long after I had started using "PSP" and I even forked the PSP site over to my own hosting account and renamed it Powtils eventually. Anyone see the play, Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe? If you watch it, or read the book, you'll discover furfags find their fantasy world inside a magical wardrobe. The drugs taken to write these sorts of books are likely the same ones Alice in Wonderland is inspired by.
The Powtils project suffered from Bikeshedding and mostly Object nazis coming in and telling us that it wasn't object oriented enough, or that it needed more exceptions to blow up code instead of actually dealing with errors properly.
Powtils would never be shipped with Freepascal distribution since Freepascal programmers are mostly object nazis incapable of coding things sensibly and simply. This is not to diss object orientation 100 percent as it does offer something sometimes. And not all freepascal programmers are that bad, it's just some bad apples.
Some of the object nazis and exception nazis even claimed that the colors chosen for the powtils websites were too hard on their eyes, so Powtils reluctantly changed color schemes millions of times to impress the latest bike shedder in the forums run by Shitty Data Storage (SDS). SDS did have its uses though: it became FUSDX idea, a text storage alternative to CVS (not a database, but just text storage intermediate file like CVS (comma separated files)). I.e. stupid ideas sometimes end up turning into interesting forks.
Before the project became known as Powtils there was a dispute about whether to stop developing in Freepascal and convert the project over to C programming language. I thought this was stupid, as C doesn't have strings (it just has pointers to chars) and since web programming deals with strings I declared the author of PSP to be suffering from mental retardation, or one of those genius types of masochist sadist programmers who wants to suffer with pointers to chars daily instead of using modern strings... That's one reason why I wanted to move the project off the PSP site because of the author wanting to convert it to C and use braindead unautomated pointers to chars (for web programming, are you fucking serious?).
After discussing this carefully with the original PSP author he kind of admitted, well, that yes C would be the main language used but if people wanted to use strings they could just use C++ and wrap PSP into object oriented C++ (cancer plus plus) crap. I could see this project was dead, and a silly idea. It was more of a scam to get Freepascal programmers converted into retarded C++ and C programmers. Now I don't have too much problem with C as it is a simple language, but C++ is cancer (unless you use a subset of it, and use it more as a high level C, but not a full fledged C++ cancer). But to use Pointers to chars for daily web programming tasks? Are you fucking kidding me... The author of PSP wanted to use C mostly and let the rare person use C++ if he had to.. for web programming, because after all real men could use Pointers to chars for anything.
The PSP suffered from licensing issues such as it trying to be GPL at one point, then creative artistic (load of complex drivel) licensed. There is even some modified LGPL code in it.. as Compact Sysutils was an attempt to get rid of the bloated sysutils unit and compartmentize it into smaller modules or a more compact unit that didn't drag in the kitchen sink. The joke about Modified LGPL licenses is they have nothing at all to do with GPL, as they go against all spirits of the GPL and LGPL since they are modified to no longer be GPL/LGPL and are clearly more like a mozilla or BSD license. The load of shit and rambling drivel that the GPL is, gets brought in along with the modified LGPL when people modify it, instead of people just using a better license. i.e. Richard Stallman's donation center to make him and his lawyers rich gets brought in at the top of every source file or something similar, even though your modified LGPL has nothing to do with GPL any more. Why do freepascal developers use a modified LGPL when a modified LGPL has absolutely nothing to do with the true spirit of GPL virus... That's another discussion for another day.
Then there was the whole Jorge Aldo Junior incident with him coming in and being allowed SVN access to make a bunch of object oriented web servers which I will not comment on, other than to say further damaging the reputation of Powtils. In his defense, he was always the one who claimed Powtils was "still maintained", whatever that means (search that page for "software maintenance").
There was also Amir, or I forget his name, who was allowed SVN access to convert Powtils into an object oriented version purely as an experiment to see how it would look, which proved to be a disaster. What you ended up with was an Iranian Canadian joke of OOP, something like "Web.WebWrite".. instead of "Web.Write". Further comments will not be given on these object nazis. Likely they were trolls added to the project by an A.I. virus to cause PSP to die.
When talking to the original developer of "PSP" often he says things like "oh is that project still alive, I thought it had died already".. so you can see that the enthusiasm for this project is purely one sided by the Powtils developer who tried to save it.. but it's still dead regardless, as Freepascal programmers are rare - there aren't many of them. Golang ended up stealing a lot of the ideas from Powtils, with or without realizing it, such as stealing our Compile Studio (rather my) idea. Now GoLang has an online web compiler just like compile studio, but better, improved. You can even compile examples in the Golang docs without copy and pasting the code into your own compiler. GoLang also stole error code ideas from the PasWiki website, with or without realizing it (a solution (partial) to the pathetic and horrific exceptions problem that Java and FPC suffer).
PSP even had a web forum, hosted on the dog humping animal fagging website "Furtopia"..which I converted over to Powtils (probably before I realized Furtopia was an animal humping fetish site). The Forum was pretty pathetic because it didn't use templates for the HTML it just spit out chunks of html at a time using a bunch of files. The web forum did get running on Z505 site and worked, but the SDS (simple data storage) session files caused the forum to crash every once in a while since File Locking was rolled by his own. i.e. no operating system file locking was being used, a poor implementation of file locking was chosen by original author which caused the web forum to deadlock when it got confused. i.e. the web forum did not use an SQL databse, it just used text files (unix retards would be happy... EVERYTHING IS A FILE! I kid you not.. That's proven to be a stupid Idea, unixtards). That led me to research TutorialD, a research project by a bunch of academic fools who will never make headway in the real world. They try to solve our SQL and File database problems by going relational. Did you know SQL is not really relational? Still, files are pretty cool, regardless.
The "Google code project" wiki that google implemented suffered some of the exact same wiki bugs that Simple Wiki from powtils suffered (minor bugs) in its original alpha testing, such as the first character not being parsed correctly, but all other characters were parsed properly. The code between the Google Code Project and powtils are completely unrelated, but this was funny to discover once we moved Powtils from OpenSVN crappy website over to Google Code.
Now that google code is shut down, Powtils is moved to Github. What's left of Powtils is basically a bunch of code that's still great, but the history of Powtils certainly is not funny, will not make history, and is literally a nightmare.
Yes, yes, so the great news about all this is that Powtils still has some kick ass code to be used, and a bunch of it has even been ported to GoLang too, which is a pretty cool tool although they don't give enough credit to where they stole all their ideas from, Cough oberon cough Wirth, Cough paswiki, Cough. Then again, two people invented calculus in different parts of the world around the same era, without ever knowing who each other was.. Leibniz and Newton. Who plagiarized who? Know one knows.
Did I mention CapArray and CapString have been implemented by GoLang developers already, known as calling cap() on your slice. Well, at least CapArray's have been implemented (cough, plagiarized), yes, but CapString? No one knows. This is all old news Caparray and CapString was invented in the mid 2000's, while GoLang came out in about 2009.
Luckily, some folks at google looked at the Simple Wiki source code parser and read The Art of Parsing and now go around giving lectures about writing better parsers without resorting to regexes, using techniques like peeking into strings. Or PeakFwd, if you prefer mountains and spelling error humor in source code.
The most interesting code from Powtils will definitely be plagiarized over to GoLang by myself, and I'll still even use FPC as long as an unhandled exception doesn't blow up my wife on line 22. Maybe GoLang error system handles some of these problems too. Powtils is still alive and dead! As they say.
If you think this is a joke about the furfags, plagiarizing, calling caps, think again. This is a true story bro. There's still some good code to be learned from and used, in Powtils. Regardless of the animal humping furfags that originally hosted PSP, and "creative drawers" and other such infecktions. I'm not a hacker, I'm a programmer. But L505 A.I. bot is virtually dead, so long live THX 1138, whoever that is.