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> If you look at the newest operating systems (Android, iOS, ChromeOS, Fuschia), they're all extremely same-y Agreed. This is the central argument present in t

> If you look at the newest operating systems (Android, iOS, ChromeOS, Fuschia), they're all extremely same-y Agreed. This is the central argument present in the old "Unix Haters Handbook". It describes Unix as a virus. > Go, Swift, Kotlin etc - all nice langs but very much of a muchness and avoid new ideas Agreed. This is what I think Greenspun was getting at with his "tenth rule". > iii. Hardware: also stagnant outside of mobile. Agreed, but I sure hope it doesn't stay this way. I still want real smart glasses that look like regular glasses, but perform as well as an expensive VR headset. My wife still wants digital nail polish like the receptionist in Total Recall (1990) has. > Web ideology has been fading with time and Google's dominance. I'm not sure that "web ideology" was ever really a thing outside of those responsible for describing why the WWW took off. The reason I say this is that people have been trying to shoehorn it into an application delivery platform since almost day #1. If something akin to Java applets had taken off, then I think we'd be looking at a very different, significantly-less-open web today.

revelio 3y ago
I don't think UNIX is a virus, it's not like Windows is radically different. These types of operating systems have shapes largely defined by the hardware. Still, I definitely think you can do way more exciting stuff with OS design than what anyone currently does. It would be at the higher levels rather than how the kernel works, but you can do it. Academia is a particular disappointment in this regard - that's the one place that should be able to do really interesting stuff here, yet academic OS research is dead. There's less scope to do new stuff in PL research, IMO. Most of the radical ideas there have hit dead ends. The whole pure FP thing turned out to be a dead end, when was the last time you thought about Haskell? Probably even Clojure has done better. It's not clear where you can go from here beyond usability improvements which is probably why modern languages all look the same. Hardware: there's definitely a ton of scope to do cool stuff with AR/VR goggles in the work environment. Web: Java isn't less closed than the web. Arguably it's actually more open as there are interestingly different implementations of the JVM, it's a way more modular ecosystem that's way less dependent on the absurd army-sized dev team that Chrome requires.

revelio 3y ago

I don't think UNIX is a virus, it's not like Windows is radically different. These types of operating systems have shapes largely defined by the hardware. Still, I definitely think you can do way more exciting stuff with OS design than what anyone currently does. It would be at the higher levels rather than how the kernel works, but you can do it. Academia is a particular disappointment in this regard - that's the one place that should be able to do really interesting stuff here, yet academic OS research is dead. There's less scope to do new stuff in PL research, IMO. Most of the radical ideas there have hit dead ends. The whole pure FP thing turned out to be a dead end, when was the last time you thought about Haskell? Probably even Clojure has done better. It's not clear where you can go from here beyond usability improvements which is probably why modern languages all look the same. Hardware: there's definitely a ton of scope to do cool stuff with AR/VR goggles in the work environment. Web: Java isn't less closed than the web. Arguably it's actually more open as there are interestingly different implementations of the JVM, it's a way more modular ecosystem that's way less dependent on the absurd army-sized dev team that Chrome requires.