Thursday, July 12, 2012

When it comes to my mind that the 1990s project of moving OSes to dynlangs failed and now we're all using Unix

8 comments:

  1. There was a 1990s movement of operating systems to dynamic languages? I completely missed that. What was I doing?

    I did catch the first wave of Lisp Machine OSes. That was worth it, since I had an employer willing to pay for the cost.

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  2. I'm thinking of Dylan and NewtonScript, and to a lesser extent Obj-C which did work out.

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  3. It seems more like the shift has been to replace the OS with the browser. The OS is now just a base on which to build the browser (viz. WebOS, etc.). We're using dynlangs, but they're in webapps instead at the OS level.

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  4. OK. When I think of operating systems in the 1990s I mostly think of Taligent! Gack.

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  5. I still think someone should take JNode project and rewrite all the Java in a JVM dynamic language (preferably Clojure).

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  6. Don't forget the big move in the 90's to use typesafe languages (e.g. Modula-3, Java) to implement operating systems that could be safely extended/modified on the fly. I built the SPIN kernel, and it pains me to have to "insmod" unchecked object files into my OS.

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  7. What does the academia do?

    Running after grants, I guess.

    What do the corporations do?

    Running after quaterly reports, I guess.

    What do the free hackers do?

    Running after their bread and butter jobs, I guess.


    The only solution is to achive financial independence and to develop the next OS (or the next whatever you think is needed) yourself! Nobody will do it for you: there's no visible market (for anything that doesn't exist yet).

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  8. Alan Kay has a project at the VPRI that aims for something very exciting on this front, and they have some interesting results, too...

    http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm

    like maru, 1750 lines of code to bootstrap a compiler of a lisp-like language from C, with multiple dispatch and stuff like that:

    http://piumarta.com/software/maru/

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