On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 8:18 PM, S Krish <krishnamachari.sudha...@gmail.com>wrote:
> > 1. > > Since then, Smalltalk (SqueakNOS <http://squeaknos.blogspot.com/>), > Forth (colorForth <http://www.colorforth.com/cf.htm>), and Lisp > (Genera<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)>) > have all flirted with becoming operating systems, and > Oberon<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(programming_language)> > was > designed<http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.System.pdf> > to be one <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)> from > the start. But none achieved economic success, for the simple reason that > none of the projects involved attempted to provide value to people. They > solved technical problems to validate that their concepts can work in the > real world, but did not pursue the delivery of better solutions to > real-world problems than would otherwise be > possible.↩<http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/03/12/the-operating-system-is-out-of-date/#fnref:1> > > Except that his statement is complete bollocks. Smalltalk /did/ deliver better solutions to real-world problems. It delivered the modern desktop. But since it was a research vehicle it didn't deliver this directly. But if Smalltalk hadn't have been invented then the modern desktop would have turned up much later. Pharo hopefully corrects the course.. > > From : > http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/03/12/the-operating-system-is-out-of-date/ > > Most of all, let’s rethink the received wisdom that you should teach your > computer to do things in a programming language and run the resulting > program on an operating system. A righteous operating system should be a > programming language. And for goodness' sake, let’s not use the entire > network stack just to talk to another process on the same machine which is > responsible for managing a database using the filesystem stack. At least > let’s use shared memory (that’s what it’s *for*!). But if we believe in > the future — if we believe in ourselves — let’s dare to ask why, anyway, > does the operating system give you this “filesystem” thing that’s no good > as a database and expect you to just accept that “stuff on computers goes > in folders, lah”? Any decent software environment ought to have a fully > featured database, built in, and no need for a “filesystem”. > -- best, Eliot
