> the only alternatives you offer are tools that don't exist because people didn't use them They may not have wide adoption, but the tools he's describing very

> the only alternatives you offer are tools that don't exist because people didn't use them They may not have wide adoption, but the tools he's describing very much exist. Wirth even published a book that describes how to implement an Oberon system from top to bottom, hardware (fpga) up to UI. Systems like Symbolics, Smalltalk, Oberon, etc. all took lots of free time and funding to develop. Today's computing culture it dominated by next-quarter, short-term, profit seeking imperatives more than it was when these systems (along with the key systems we use today in production) were created. That leaves us in a bind: we have no choice but to merely iterate on what already exists and what's already available -- I'm talking about nix systems here mostly. FOSS is a bit of a negative in this regard. Armies of interested programmers working in their free time are certainly not going to be able to invent things like Oberon or Smalltalk. You need to be properly funded and have the time to come up with things. The big companies aren't really interesting in doing this either -- they can just use existing FOSS, or even pay their own people to support a project, and build on top of that. It's not surprising, then, that no one has invented a wholly new personal computing system in decades. Our current culture is, in my view, somewhat similar to medieval scholasticism. We are going to endlessly churn the the FOSS/nix soup until there is some kind of revolution in thought or action.