>But there is a lot of culture in computing, and a big problem that isn't recognised let along acknowledged is that today, there are basically only 2 surviving

>But there is a lot of culture in computing, and a big problem that isn't recognised let along acknowledged is that today, there are basically only 2 surviving branches on one tree, when 30-40 years ago there was a whole forest. I guess 30-40 years ago computing was much newer, there was a lot more enthusiasm and people were willing to try many new things and do things in many different way. At a conceptual level, Go isn't very different from Java which isn't very different from Python. LISP is quite different from Smalltalk and Smalltalk is quite different from ML and ML is quite different from Prolog. As for small, home operating systems, BeOS was quite different from both Mac and Windows. :) > Suggest that, hey, let's run Smalltalk on the bare metal and teach kids on that, so that they don't even have to ever know what "a file" is or means, and people will say "that's crazy talk!" A file is just an abstraction, and so are Unix pipes. I don't see while there can't be other valid concepts to hold data than files.