Riding the wind of rebirth

Zhou Zhi was a little confused, so he called Hu Tianyu, the main developer of the software, and asked him why he did this. We worked so hard to develop class libraries and object-oriented programming, wasn't it just to make the software window-based and mouse-based for easy operation? What kind of perverse thing is this?

Hu Tianyu's answer was concise and clear. This version of QQ is for programmers to show off. It mainly uses a shortcut key plus command operation. It is extremely fast and efficient. Of course, the premise is that you are extremely familiar with the commands and shortcut keys.

Recalling the few perverts in the unit who could use the WINDOWS system to great effect without a mouse and only using a keyboard, Zhou Zhi could only pinch his nose and say that you guys are really pretending to be fresh and unworldly.

After mastering JAVA, Zhou Zhi requested that the development of QQ's server-side applications, such as account management, group chat and other functions, be completed on the JAVA platform.

At the same time, the Hanwen input method was also transformed into a unified JAVA version.

Because JAVA is also a cross-platform programming language, compared to C++, it has good portability and security, is more concise, has a large number of class libraries suitable for the network, and has many rich functions and stable performance such as fast, flexible and easy to embed.

In addition, Zhou Zhi also asked Patrick's team to continue to develop a JAVA-based but more "lightweight" programming language. The biggest feature of this programming language is that it is a simple and efficient scripting language, and it allows programming enthusiasts to publish and download a large number of plug-ins and extension applets on the Clover Forum.

Programmers can use these plug-ins and applets to easily complete some tedious programming tasks. This is actually a development tool with an embedded real-time update forum plug-in, which is suitable for game development, embedded systems, script extensions and other fields. With the JAVA version of QQ, this tool will be able to facilitate everyone to develop their own JAVA version of QQ plug-ins and extensions.

This was a genius idea, which turned the real-time communication software QQ from being developed independently by Clover Company into a software that everyone could participate in. This chat software, which was already popular among college students, immediately became more fancy.

The first thing that appeared was all kinds of fancy skins for QQ and input methods. Zhou Zhi seriously suspected that these were made by a few "love-driven" experts in the company, because this software, which was just named Alpenstock and whose icon was a trekking pole, was released on the forum not long ago. Logically, there shouldn't be so many skilled users.

However, after verification, Zhou Zhi discovered that these skin kits were not developed by people from Clover Company, but by a group from Xijing University of Science and Technology who used the LUA scripting language. They discovered that LUA could be used as a plug-in for Alpenstock for "socket development."

So Zhou Zhi asked Clover to connect with Xijing University of Science and Technology, and learned that Lua was developed in 1993 by a three-person research and development team at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is a small scripting language based on standard C. Its design purpose is to write small plug-ins that can be flexibly embedded in applications, thereby providing flexible expansion and customization capabilities for the applications.

Due to its special positioning, it does not even have its own class library and is not suitable as a language for developing independent applications. It is only suitable for writing "plug-ins". Even it itself is currently only suitable as a "plug-in" to serve large-scale development languages. The most distinctive feature is that it has a JIT environment that can provide just-in-time compilation capabilities on specific platforms.

Since LUA and Alpenstock are highly compatible and their functions complement each other, Zhou Zhi asked the Technical Intelligence Department of AXA Fund to directly buy its IP. The final "plug-in development language" was named ALUA.

JAVA and ALUA, one is mainly internal and the other is mainly external, and together they constitute the best R&D ecosystem for network applications.

The emergence of the two major tools and the birth of a huge user group quickly promoted the development of related software. The one that benefited the most was QQ. After the value of many creative and powerful "plug-ins" was discovered by Clover Company, a business team would be sent to find the developers to buy the ownership of the plug-ins and then integrate them into the new version of QQ.

QQ conference was bought in this way. The "Software Alliance" section of Clover Forum now has "Four Great Kings" as moderators. They all come from all over the world, but Zhou Zhi actually knows their names through daily chats and mutual help.

In the previous life, they were all big guys who could make the digital world tremble with just a stomp of their feet, but now they are all in the starting stage. Zhou Zhi jokingly called them "Qiu Lei Martin".

Looking for Jinshan, Lei Jun, Ma Xunteng, Ding Lei, all of them are potential stocks.

This conference plug-in was developed by Qiu Jinshan, who was later known as "China's No. 1 Programmer". Because everyone thought it was better than the conference function of Clover, they spent money to buy this plug-in and integrated it into the new version of QQ Conference.

Qiu Jinsoft was originally developing WPS. After receiving the money, he left Shenzhen and went to Zhuhai to serve as the chairman and general manager of Kingsoft Computer Company.

After Zhouzhi has this plug-in, it is more convenient to form groups and hold meetings. He can gather teams of college students who are working and studying through the Internet, and use dialects in assessments and recruitments. In addition, for students from the Chinese departments of various colleges and universities who have a certain foundation in liberal arts field research and philology, they can initially build a dialect phonetic and rhyme database by reciting word cards by themselves.

Of course, this database is incomplete. College students have to go back to their hometowns during the holidays to conduct field research. Through the study of slang, they can find out the "ancient" usage of dialects, eliminate the "contamination" of modern languages, and try to restore relatively independent "early dialects".

In this process, you should be able to discover many ancient sounds, rhymes, and tunes that have been abandoned.

Once these are added, the database will be complete.

But this is just a method-level idea. To store these things for easy retrieval and utilization, a set of powerful information technology tools are needed to support them.

The first is the issue of capacity. Although the storage space occupied by sound information is smaller than that of image information, it is still much larger than that of text encoding.

Secondly, we need to solve the simulation of "harmony of sound and rhyme" and "harmony of tone", which involves the problem of segmenting the dialect field data into rhyme and sound and recombining them after segmentation, as well as assigning tones to them and then simulating the pronunciation with computer signals.

This is the most basic collection, storage and the roughest application. It is already amazing to be able to complete these in two years of graduate study. As for more detailed research and the inference of Middle Chinese and Ancient Chinese sounds, that is the "superstructure" that can only be carried out after these foundations are laid.

Therefore, this project is actually divided into two legs, technology accumulation and data collection, which are moving forward in coordination. (End of this chapter)