On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 09:15:55AM -0700, SJS wrote:
begin quoting David Brown as of Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 09:12:31AM -0700:
[snip]
Charles Moore may be brilliant but he doesn't seem to be able to think
outside of his very tiny little box. He thinks operating systems are
antequated and should go away (as in, we should all just be running forth
systems directly on modern hardware). He just doesn't have a very
realistic view of the world.
Don't a lot of the Smalltalk and LISP advocates think the same way?
Charles Moore's reductionism makes things impractical. He eshews things
like memory management, filesystems, and even data types. Both Lisp and
Smalltalk use garbage collected, type-tagged data with no direct pointer
manipulation.
Lisp and Smalltalk came from a time when their systems were much more
powerful than other operating systems of the time. Some of the ideas we
take for granted today come from these systems.
It is a bit frustrating that most Common Lisp systems are trying to be the
whole OS as well. It integrates nicely, but makes it hard to make small,
standalone utilities.
David
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