On picking one of the "Languages of the Gods" -- which and why
[Another repurposed comment from the same Lobsters thread I mentioned in my previous post.]
A serious answer deserved a serious response, so I slept on it, and, well, as you can see, it took some time. I don't even the excuse that "Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."
If you are curious to ( Read more... )
For instance, AIUI mainstream Plan 9 does not support x86-64, although there are forks (Plan 9-9k, Jehanne OS) that do.
Long ago I found an installable image of Inferno and had a brief play. I cannot find such a thing any more. :-(
I do also wonder if, given a willingness to be somewhat brutal, it might not be possible to combine Plan 9 and Inferno into a single OS... or perhaps even skip that step and develop a successor to Inferno that uses Go instead of Limbo.
As for document-centric OSes...
The original Apple LisaOS was document-centric and did not have "apps" as such. I have only had very brief plays with Lisa hardware, sadly. OS/2 2's Workplace Shell was document-centric; for instance, the recommended way to create a new file was to open the Templates folder and drag a template out into the folder where you wanted it. What app opened it was the OS's concern, not the users.
I tried it. I hated it. I found it cumbersome, and it hindered interop with non-OS/2-native apps -- and the ability to run DOS and Win16 apps was a core part of OS/2's appeal.
The modern smartphone model seems to work well for most people. Apps are easily conceptualised. You open the app, you're in it. Everything else disappears. You can create and save your work. The phone worries about where it is or what it's called; you don't have to. You don't even need to open and close apps. The user can't even tell which apps are currently open. This is good; they should not _need_ to.
iOS doesn't directly let apps open each other's data, except by cleanly-defined verbs: "share *this* with *that* tool."
It's the reverse of the old, much-vaunted document-centric model, and I think it's a good, smart implementation.
The flipside is what the Canon Cat did. You don't really have apps at all and you don't have documents either. You just have all your stuff; the computer provides different capabilities within one infinitely-big workspace. Add a new ability and suddenly *your* Cat can do new stuff. Say, as well as just letting you enter a table of figures, now you can sort them, total them, or do other calculations on them. Add a new ability, and it can graph them.
This is more like how it _ought_ to me, IMHO.
Document-centric UIs sound like a better idea than I think they are. We need to step further back and realise that the whole notion of "files" that you find, then "load", then work on and then "save" is itself a historical artefact of 1960s-1970s computer design, with primary and secondary storage, and we don't _need_ that split any more.
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At least the old notions of having to save stuff yourself has largely disappeared in iOS and MacOS. It’s always a shock to the system to remember to do it on windows and Linux.
All current OSs are a product of 1960s architecture :-(
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> just really have documents rather than a notion of applications. Even the Lisa required you
> to have different document types for each underlying application.
Ahh, OK. I was thinking of something more Lisa-like.
I suppose the Cat is. It was a smart hardware text editor that was extensible. It was designed by Jef Raskin, the original architect of the Apple Macintosh before the project was taken from him and became a sort of "Lisa Lite". He coined the phrase "information appliance". He pointed out that *really* simple appliances don't even have an ON/OFF switch -- e.g. a toaster or a landline telephone. He aspired to make a computer that simple.
Apple took his project from him, he left, went to work for Canon and made it in the guise of something almost but not entirely like a dedicated hardware word-processor.
> At least the old notions of having to save stuff yourself has largely disappeared in iOS and
> MacOS.
Agreed.
> It’s always a shock to the system to remember to do it on windows and Linux.
Well, sort of. I mostly work in the old-fashioned way even on macOS, myself. :-)
> All current OSs are a product of 1960s architecture :-(
Absolutely. That is what I want to get away from, and was the focus of my talk.
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