> I'm not convinced an OS or programming language or database needs millions of lines of code. I think this (implicit in most cases) belief that OSes are inher

> I'm not convinced an OS or programming language or database needs millions of lines of code. I think this (implicit in most cases) belief that OSes are inherently complex and therefore require mounds of code is a result of our current computing culture and the expectations set by the open source movement. OSS/FOSS is great, but has kind of frozen things at Unix. We have sacrificed simplicity and comprehensibility in the name of platform compatibility. It's not just STEPS that shows another way, as compelling and underappreciated as that project is. Older systems like Oberon, Smalltalk, and even the Lisp Machines were examples of systems that had a different idea of what "simplicity" means. Unix principles, Posix architecture, x86 -- these things are not natural laws. They are artifacts with immense historical and cultural inertia. What's worse is that today we have widely accepted and utilized standards (for communication and data formats) that we didn't have back in the days of greater computing platform diversity. If anything this should be leading us to create exotic systems once again, now that they can better inter-communicate and translate data. But we aren't -- and not for technical reasons. We should make a rule that if the full computing system cannot be reasonably described in a book, then it isn't simple enough.