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by mycroftiv
5451 days ago
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I've been reading this blog intermittently for quite a long time, and despite a lot of good conceptual thinking, I believe the author fails to understand a lot of principles which are equally important to the ones that he espouses. Maybe the most important is independence of layers - the author seems convinced that, as he says in this post, "it is the bedrock abstractions of a system which create its overall flavor. They are the ultimate constraints on the range of thinkable thoughts for designer and user alike." I think this is simply wrong. Certainly, abstractions tend to leak, but the loper-os guy thinks that you can't create a usable system unless you extend lisp-like concepts all the way down to the CPU designs. He never seems to acknowledge that technologies like virtualization actually work to create independent environments. |
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This is because they don't.
Environments can be independent in the information-security sense (what you and others confuse with full conceptual independence) without being independent in the propagation-of-brokenness sense. Easy example: your power supply.
Give me, say, a Common Lisp (rather low bar!) environment which is entirely uninfluenced by the brokenness of x86. [1] Then we'll talk about independence of layers.
When the last idiot talking about static languages being "inherently efficient" has vanished, then we'll talk about independence of layers.
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[1] For instance: the fact that you need threads at all. On a dataflow architecture, threads and their attendant idiocies - locking, race conditions, etc. are forgotten like a bad dream.