5 ms·

Because reinventing the wheel is an immense amount of fun, if you get to do it yourself. ;) A good learning experience too. Everyone should at one point write

Because reinventing the wheel is an immense amount of fun, if you get to do it yourself. ;) A good learning experience too. Everyone should at one point write their own compiler. And maybe their own OS. (I'm only half kidding here)

rad_gruchalski 10y ago
That's a good reason.
- the_duke 10y ago
  Someone should tell the JS crowd though, that you shouldn't neccessarily reinvent everything every 6 months and use it in production.
  - creshal 10y ago
    We did tell them, and they went and started to reinvent everything every 3 months.
  - themihai 10y ago
    Sometimes it may worth it. FFI was never fun regardless the host language except perhaps C++ -> C.
vertex-four 10y ago
Everyone should at least try writing their own OS. Not necessarily their own kernel, or even the lowest-level utilities - things like Fiasco.OC with Genode are decent enough if you're not interested in register fiddling - but their own model for how things could work if they got to design a system for programmers and users to use from scratch. Capability systems? Network transparent message passing? Dynamic load-balancing of running processes across machines? What if you tried to let users script their workflows in a less ad-hoc way than they can now? How about trying to replace the concept of a filesystem, at the same time as trying to encourage applications to share data with each other? OS development research died a couple of decades ago, and now we have an entire generation of developers who believe the Linux/POSIX model to be the one true system. But IMHO, that's just a quirk of fate, and a local maxima, and it keeps people in the dark about alternative solutions to their problems. For example, capability system advocates will point out that their system almost implements Docker/containerization by default. There have been tons of experiments with efficient message-passing under microkernels which would likely benefit anyone attempting to design Yet Another IPC Framework in the Linux kernel. And so on and so forth.

rad_gruchalski 10y ago

That's a good reason.

the_duke 10y ago
Someone should tell the JS crowd though, that you shouldn't neccessarily reinvent everything every 6 months and use it in production.
- creshal 10y ago
  We did tell them, and they went and started to reinvent everything every 3 months.
- themihai 10y ago
  Sometimes it may worth it. FFI was never fun regardless the host language except perhaps C++ -> C.

vertex-four 10y ago

Everyone should at least try writing their own OS. Not necessarily their own kernel, or even the lowest-level utilities - things like Fiasco.OC with Genode are decent enough if you're not interested in register fiddling - but their own model for how things could work if they got to design a system for programmers and users to use from scratch. Capability systems? Network transparent message passing? Dynamic load-balancing of running processes across machines? What if you tried to let users script their workflows in a less ad-hoc way than they can now? How about trying to replace the concept of a filesystem, at the same time as trying to encourage applications to share data with each other? OS development research died a couple of decades ago, and now we have an entire generation of developers who believe the Linux/POSIX model to be the one true system. But IMHO, that's just a quirk of fate, and a local maxima, and it keeps people in the dark about alternative solutions to their problems. For example, capability system advocates will point out that their system almost implements Docker/containerization by default. There have been tons of experiments with efficient message-passing under microkernels which would likely benefit anyone attempting to design Yet Another IPC Framework in the Linux kernel. And so on and so forth.