Blip was started in 2008 while Fawzi was working at the Chemistry institute at Prof. Sauer Group, with a AvH fellowship.
The aim was to build a new basis for my development of computational programs, especially in the chemistry and molecular modeling field.
The tango library gave an excellent starting point for many things, but was missing some basic things, so blip was born. It is possible that some pieces of blip will end up into tango, and in fact the random number generation already did the jump: it used to be in blip.random and now it is tango.math.random just like the Atomic module.
In several places blip wraps tango, that is done in purpose to insulate a bit from changes in tango, something that has been shown to be useful. This would also help porting blip to phobos for example if the need should arise.
To manipulate 2,3 and 4D vectors, quaternions and matrixes pieces of the excellent xf.omg of Tomasz Stachowiak, with smaller adaptions are used
The lapack/blas wrappers come from the gobo project of Bill Baxter, that also inspired some design decisions of NArray.
The first interface to libev did use Leandro Lucarella ev wrappers, but now it has been fully replaced.
Hopefully soon there will be more people/work to list here…
enjoy
Fawzi