Taking a 10,000' view of modern OS design. (Warning: extended rant.)

[liam_on_linux]

Frankly, coming from a background in 1980s and 1990s OSes, I think modern ones are appalling shite. They're huge, baggy, flabby sacks of crap that drag themselves around leaving a trail of slime and viscera - but like some blasphemous shoggoth, they have organs to spare, and the computers they run on are so powerful and have so much storage that

Comments

[uon]

You say this:
I'm not a programmer.

Followed by:
Your computer should know that a street address is an address, [...] It should understand names and dates and amounts of money

Your first statement gives some indication of why you think the problems you list in the second statement should be easy to solve, when from the right (or wrong) angle they can look a lot like trying to solve the generalised DWIM problem. Quite a few seemingly easy tasks can actually be a right pain to do properly. It's dead easy to say "just calculate this bit, reformat that bit" until, in order to actually program a machine to do so, you try to get a sufficiently concrete understanding of what it actually means in every context, and discover yourself deep in the weeds of weird problems you never even knew existed. There's a reason "yak shaving" is a common jargon term amongst programmers - even just trying to answer the question "what time is it?" can be unbelievably trickyThat's not to say that I'm happy with the state of the art in software or hardware

[andrewducker]

Yeah, that's my feeling with this stuff too.

It feels a bit like Ted Nelson shouting "HTML is bad and wrong and impure, and there is a better way!"

To which my answer is "Yes, and I am in no way convinced that said better way is actually any better by the time you've implemented a global-scale system in it!"

[liam_on_linux]

That's true, and I picked that merely as a to-hand example. It's not a fanciful made-up one. It's based on Jef Raskin's research and the original concept for the Macintosh before Steve Jobs took over and made it into an inexpensive vehicle for the radical new idea of the GUI.

I need to back that up with links and citations, clearly, and the page that I read about it seems to have gone. OK, for future reference, I'll remove that section.

I'd read the real-names article before; the other 2 were new to me - ta.

I was looking for a general example of something non-programming-language or system-architecture related. This is either not it, or needs to be fleshed out much more.

So, thanks for pulling me up on it.

[ext_1399867]

Imagine a 64bit version of Apple Integer Basic with gigs of ram!! ZOOOOM!

[liam_on_linux]

Actually, there is a mad Englishman doing something much like that. His name is Paul Dunn and he's working from the European equivalent of the Apple II - the Sinclair Spectrum. (We were too poor over here for Steve & Steve's sub-$1000 computer, so we all used Clive Sinclair's sub-£100 computer instead.)

https://sites.google.com/site/pauldunn/

SpecBAS is Sinclair BASIC, with some enhancements, running as a thin fast app under all modern OSes, with direct access to modern screen and sound hardware. Dead simple, fast as hell.

[lostcarpark]

I agree with the goal, and that getting there is hard. Today's computers can understand something like an address, but only if you tell it that it is an address, and no matter how often you tell people, they will just type the address into Word, and mess up the postcode. Getting the computer to recognise an address without being explicitly told is hard, because different countries have different address formats, and people don't always follow them correctly. Website forms tend to ask you to break up the address in specific ways, but tend to be programmed according to the conventions of the country of the designer's country, and address from other countries don't always fit properly.