4 ms·

If the age of a position negatively impacts its correctness, we should re-examine Newton's Laws :) I guess that most anything is 'somewhat fluid and subject to

If the age of a position negatively impacts its correctness, we should re-examine Newton's Laws :) I guess that most anything is 'somewhat fluid and subject to interpretation', but I still find it difficult to understand how a software engineer can conflate the idea of an OS (which essentially manages computer resources) with a browser.

KirinDave 18y ago
"Dated" doesn't mean old, it means old-fashioned or somewhat anachronistic by modern standards. All he's really talking about is a "runtime environment" when he says OS. What we consider the bare bones of a modern OS is, by standards set 30 years ago, irreparably full of excess and waste. Even if you look back 10 years features have been added which were once impractical. The feature creep all software experiences means that over time, what's considered the "bottom" of the software hierarchy is constantly reaching up to the top. And it gets really complex when you start talking about emulation. Is an OS suddenly not an OS when it's run in software emulation? What about virtualization? If the resources it manages are fictions, does that change what it is? And then you get into insular environments that certainly could be made to run on bare metal environments if you wanted to, like Lisp and Smalltalk. Where do they sit? Maybe "Operating System" is a misnomer, but it's not far from the truth from the perspective of a web programmer deploying applications to a target over the network.
- comatose_kid 18y ago
  You have some interesting points. But just because something runs on bare metal doesn't make it an OS (many Amiga video games tossed the OS for example). An OS running in s/w emulation is still an OS. It manages resources for the apps, it doesn't matter what lies beneath - same goes for virtualization.
eru 18y ago
They were re-examined. Remember Lorentz and his transformations?

KirinDave 18y ago

"Dated" doesn't mean old, it means old-fashioned or somewhat anachronistic by modern standards. All he's really talking about is a "runtime environment" when he says OS. What we consider the bare bones of a modern OS is, by standards set 30 years ago, irreparably full of excess and waste. Even if you look back 10 years features have been added which were once impractical. The feature creep all software experiences means that over time, what's considered the "bottom" of the software hierarchy is constantly reaching up to the top. And it gets really complex when you start talking about emulation. Is an OS suddenly not an OS when it's run in software emulation? What about virtualization? If the resources it manages are fictions, does that change what it is? And then you get into insular environments that certainly could be made to run on bare metal environments if you wanted to, like Lisp and Smalltalk. Where do they sit? Maybe "Operating System" is a misnomer, but it's not far from the truth from the perspective of a web programmer deploying applications to a target over the network.

comatose_kid 18y ago
You have some interesting points. But just because something runs on bare metal doesn't make it an OS (many Amiga video games tossed the OS for example). An OS running in s/w emulation is still an OS. It manages resources for the apps, it doesn't matter what lies beneath - same goes for virtualization.

eru 18y ago

They were re-examined. Remember Lorentz and his transformations?