About Quine

Development for Quine began in 2014 when thatDot founder and CEO Ryan Wright decided he'd rebuilt the same event processing microservice platform one too many times. In 2015, Wright partnered with DARPA, through its Transparent Computing program, to accelerate development.

The decision to open source the Quine graph streaming engine underscores the thatDot team’s conviction that the best infrastructure software thrives within an open, diverse community of contributors and that well-made software freely available benefits everyone.

Origin of the Project Name

Willard Van Orman Quine was a 20th century teacher and philosopher of logic and science. Though influenced by logical positivism, Quine rejected the notion of a distinction between analytical truths and empirical truths. Instead, he maintained that both logic (and math) and science were subject to empirical rules and could be refined through observation and the examination of countervailing evidence.

It was Quine’s work Two Dogmas of Empiricism that inspired the project’s name. According to Ryan Wright, the original developer of Quine, "About 2 years into the development of Quine the system, I started to realize that many of his ideas had very direct parallels in the system I’d been developing. For example, Quine’s interesting sidebar in 'Two Dogmas’ where he asks, ‘which points in Ohio are starting points?’ impressed me as being related to indexes in Quine. Hence the name."

For more on Quine’s work: The Partially Examined Life Podcast Episode 66: Quine on Linguistic Meaning and Science