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This article is bonkers. How can you directly compare a programming language to multitasking operating systems with desktop enviroments? In what sense is this a

This article is bonkers. How can you directly compare a programming language to multitasking operating systems with desktop enviroments? In what sense is this a sensible comparison? A comparison of embedded code written in C vs Forth would make sense but starting from Plan9 and then swerving off into embedded programming, all the while laying down a thick layer of condescension... Maybe I'm missing something?

jff 10y ago
I can only assume that when the article was written in 2000, Plan 9 was getting some press in the venues he was following, so writing an article purporting to be about Plan 9 (but not really about Plan 9 at all) seemed sensible.
Sanddancer 10y ago
The article was written in the year 2000. A lot has changed since then, in pretty much every realm that he discusses. It's not a bonkers article, but it is an artifact of an earlier era.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Even in 2000 we knew the difference. The author is either naive or ignorant. That while having an agenda to promote his own work on a niche platform.
  - catwell 10y ago
    Well, the view that we can do without "Operating Systems", or rather have the language be the operating system, is not new. It has always been pretty popular in the Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth... communities. Daniel Ingalls famously wrote in 1981: "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." [1] A few years ago a paper argued that Plan 9 was basically trying to achieve that Smalltalk vision. [2] And if you think about it, that view is extremely fashinable today, with the rise of unikernels [3]. Granted, they are not used for Desktop systems as of now, but who says they won't be in a few years. [1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.... [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~srk31/research/papers/kell13operating.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~srk31/research/papers/kell13operat... [3] http://unikernel.org/ http://unikernel.org/
cturner 10y ago
"How can you directly compare a programming language to multitasking operating systems with desktop enviroments?" People who grew up in the 8-bit era might remember the reverse of this mental shift when they first encountered the IBM PC, and were told they needed an operating system for it. Why is the OS an independent idea from the hardware I bought? Why do I need it? Why isn't everything I need built into the computer itself? "Maybe I'm missing something?" It flowed for me, I'll try to explain my reaction. What we think of as an operating system or a language are specialisations of a common idea: they are mechanism for driving a computer. Mainstream development practice is all about facading existing technology. You write a web gui that comes from a web server that is set up with a DSL. The webserver calls a perl script that shells out and calls perl libraries and makes system calls. And so on. And then we build complex tools to herd all of the complexity: nixos and node.js and IDEs and LLVM and systemd. We have created human language to refer to these abstractions: operating system, programming language, compiler, package manager, IDE. Forth is different. It's a technique for solving problems by eliminating cruft (rather than facading it). It doesn't have a whole lot of respect for facader language ideas. There are similar projects working in the same spirit, but which have let the bedrock sit further out from the hardware. There's a crowd who want to bedrock on an array language shell, and they build it in a bizarre dialect of C with a means-to-an-end attitude: that's the operating system project the kparc.com team are working on. There's a crowd who want to bedrock on an easily-networked file-system+bitmap-display abstraction over the hardware, and who are fond of algol-like programming languages: that's plan 9. There's a crowd who want to bedrock on linux's excellent suite of hardware drivers: that's suckless.org. A dev who only lives and breathes IntelliJ might mark a vi-using suckless user as a minimalism extremist, be unable to understand their motive. Whereas a kparc developer will flag the same suckless fan a pragmatist but recognise the shared purpose. The culture war over systemd is an example of the tension between facaders and minimalists. As the facade-the-world attitude has ramped up, Unix has gradually become less and less effective as a host system. If you accept the facader worldview, systemd is the appropriate response. But systemd alienated the minimalists. Before systemd, linux was effective for people who wanted an expedient shell into their computer with adequate hardware and browser support. Systemd added complexity to their bedrock.
- robochat42 10y ago

jff 10y ago

I can only assume that when the article was written in 2000, Plan 9 was getting some press in the venues he was following, so writing an article purporting to be about Plan 9 (but not really about Plan 9 at all) seemed sensible.

Sanddancer 10y ago

The article was written in the year 2000. A lot has changed since then, in pretty much every realm that he discusses. It's not a bonkers article, but it is an artifact of an earlier era.

AstralStorm 10y ago
Even in 2000 we knew the difference. The author is either naive or ignorant. That while having an agenda to promote his own work on a niche platform.
- catwell 10y ago
  Well, the view that we can do without "Operating Systems", or rather have the language be the operating system, is not new. It has always been pretty popular in the Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth... communities. Daniel Ingalls famously wrote in 1981: "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." [1] A few years ago a paper argued that Plan 9 was basically trying to achieve that Smalltalk vision. [2] And if you think about it, that view is extremely fashinable today, with the rise of unikernels [3]. Granted, they are not used for Desktop systems as of now, but who says they won't be in a few years. [1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.... [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~srk31/research/papers/kell13operating.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~srk31/research/papers/kell13operat... [3] http://unikernel.org/ http://unikernel.org/

cturner 10y ago

"How can you directly compare a programming language to multitasking operating systems with desktop enviroments?" People who grew up in the 8-bit era might remember the reverse of this mental shift when they first encountered the IBM PC, and were told they needed an operating system for it. Why is the OS an independent idea from the hardware I bought? Why do I need it? Why isn't everything I need built into the computer itself? "Maybe I'm missing something?" It flowed for me, I'll try to explain my reaction. What we think of as an operating system or a language are specialisations of a common idea: they are mechanism for driving a computer. Mainstream development practice is all about facading existing technology. You write a web gui that comes from a web server that is set up with a DSL. The webserver calls a perl script that shells out and calls perl libraries and makes system calls. And so on. And then we build complex tools to herd all of the complexity: nixos and node.js and IDEs and LLVM and systemd. We have created human language to refer to these abstractions: operating system, programming language, compiler, package manager, IDE. Forth is different. It's a technique for solving problems by eliminating cruft (rather than facading it). It doesn't have a whole lot of respect for facader language ideas. There are similar projects working in the same spirit, but which have let the bedrock sit further out from the hardware. There's a crowd who want to bedrock on an array language shell, and they build it in a bizarre dialect of C with a means-to-an-end attitude: that's the operating system project the kparc.com team are working on. There's a crowd who want to bedrock on an easily-networked file-system+bitmap-display abstraction over the hardware, and who are fond of algol-like programming languages: that's plan 9. There's a crowd who want to bedrock on linux's excellent suite of hardware drivers: that's suckless.org. A dev who only lives and breathes IntelliJ might mark a vi-using suckless user as a minimalism extremist, be unable to understand their motive. Whereas a kparc developer will flag the same suckless fan a pragmatist but recognise the shared purpose. The culture war over systemd is an example of the tension between facaders and minimalists. As the facade-the-world attitude has ramped up, Unix has gradually become less and less effective as a host system. If you accept the facader worldview, systemd is the appropriate response. But systemd alienated the minimalists. Before systemd, linux was effective for people who wanted an expedient shell into their computer with adequate hardware and browser support. Systemd added complexity to their bedrock.

robochat42 10y ago