3 ms·

I've been reading this blog intermittently for quite a long time, and despite a lot of good conceptual thinking, I believe the author fails to understand a lot

I've been reading this blog intermittently for quite a long time, and despite a lot of good conceptual thinking, I believe the author fails to understand a lot of principles which are equally important to the ones that he espouses. Maybe the most important is independence of layers - the author seems convinced that, as he says in this post, "it is the bedrock abstractions of a system which create its overall flavor. They are the ultimate constraints on the range of thinkable thoughts for designer and user alike." I think this is simply wrong. Certainly, abstractions tend to leak, but the loper-os guy thinks that you can't create a usable system unless you extend lisp-like concepts all the way down to the CPU designs. He never seems to acknowledge that technologies like virtualization actually work to create independent environments.

asciilifeform 15y ago
> He never seems to acknowledge that technologies like virtualization actually work to create independent environments. This is because they don't. Environments can be independent in the information-security sense (what you and others confuse with full conceptual independence) without being independent in the propagation-of-brokenness sense. Easy example: your power supply. Give me, say, a Common Lisp (rather low bar!) environment which is entirely uninfluenced by the brokenness of x86. [1] Then we'll talk about independence of layers. When the last idiot talking about static languages being "inherently efficient" has vanished, then we'll talk about independence of layers. -- [1] For instance: the fact that you need threads at all. On a dataflow architecture, threads and their attendant idiocies - locking, race conditions, etc. are forgotten like a bad dream.
- MrJagil 15y ago
  Stop calling people idiots.
  - asciilifeform 15y ago
    Stop telling people to stop calling idiots idiots.

asciilifeform 15y ago

> He never seems to acknowledge that technologies like virtualization actually work to create independent environments. This is because they don't. Environments can be independent in the information-security sense (what you and others confuse with full conceptual independence) without being independent in the propagation-of-brokenness sense. Easy example: your power supply. Give me, say, a Common Lisp (rather low bar!) environment which is entirely uninfluenced by the brokenness of x86. [1] Then we'll talk about independence of layers. When the last idiot talking about static languages being "inherently efficient" has vanished, then we'll talk about independence of layers. -- [1] For instance: the fact that you need threads at all. On a dataflow architecture, threads and their attendant idiocies - locking, race conditions, etc. are forgotten like a bad dream.

MrJagil 15y ago
Stop calling people idiots.
- asciilifeform 15y ago
  Stop telling people to stop calling idiots idiots.