[mportela]

This post would benefit from further expanding some of these statements.

> UNIX isn’t good enough anymore and it’s getting worse

Why exactly?

> A new operating system means we can explore new ideas in new ways.

LISP machines were not only OSes but also hardware. Is the author also proposing running this OS on optimized hardware or simply using our x86-64/AMD/M1 CPUs?

> With lisp machines, we can cut out the complicated multi-language, multi library mess from the stack, eliminate memory leaks and questions of type safety, binary exploits, and millions of lines of sheer complexity that clog up modern computers.

Sure, but it also requires rewriting a lot of these things, introducing and fixing new bugs... It feels like the good ol' "let's rewrite this program" that quite frequently doesn't live up to the expectations [1].

[1] https://vibratingmelon.com/2011/06/10/why-you-should-almost-...

[traverseda]

>> UNIX isn’t good enough anymore and it’s getting worse

>Why exactly?

Personally? We're in a bit of a transition point, and a lot of the technologies aren't working together like they used to.

An example, on my laptop I want to run android apps. The way to do this that actually works well (waydroid) only supports wayland. Unfortunately I use x2x to control another display remotely, and x2x doesn't work properly under wayland, and never will due to wayland's security choices.

So like, what am I supposed to do here? Not run android apps? Not use tools like barrier/synergy/x2x?

This is one of many many frustrations I've had from this new generation of wayland/systemd/etc. Hopefully it gets better eventually but it does feel a lot like the rug is constantly being pulled out from under me for no good reason...

Now I don't think a lisp machine is going to fix that mind you, but it is a concern.

[sseagull]

I am finding that everything is just becoming more and more fragmented. Programming languages, ecosystems, frameworks, blah.

I have had ideas for some applications, but can’t do them because the libraries I need are written in different languages, which don’t interoperate well (and one I am not familiar in).

Every post here looking for recommendations has many responses with different packages/ecosystems doing the same thing.

Sometimes I feel like there are too many developers and not enough of them really interested in the actual hard problems. So they just make another python package manager or webapp framework.

[eternityforest]

I think they are too invested im hard problems, but not invested enough in tedious problems.

I don't want a new language, or a new preprocesser, or a new way of thinking about programs... I just want a one click way to take a folder of HTML that looks like a static site, and package it up into cross platform apps with all the proper API access.

I don't care about cryptocurrency and global decentralized databases, I just want to be able to run a site by buying a NAS appliances, putting files on it, and sharing the QR code on it without any signups and cloud accounts.

The hard problems are mostly solved. There's probably some long dead random github repo that does anything you want. They're just not packaged for all platforms and maintained professionally.

I don't need a phone without any binary blobs at all... I just want a mesh network feature and a fair trade stamp.

Because... it sucks to maintain something novel even if it's all just pieced together from npm. It sucks to be the one responding to issues. It sucks to actually run a project and keep track of devops stuff.

All the tech has been invented dozens of times over, but never polished, and always ruined with some unnecessary immutable log feature or performance destroying random access low latency routing thing like IPFS has.

[TheOtherHobbes]

There's a gap between developer culture and the giant corporate bureaucracies.

The former is focussed on tinkering, nostalgia, tool-building, wheel reinventions, and half-finished build-and-forget spare time projects.

The latter has successfully applied high-friction chokeholds around startup culture which makes the cost of entry for new business ideas far higher than it really needs to be.

There is almost no blue sky development equivalent to the original Internet, the Mother of All Demos, and the desktop computing model - and associated projects - created at PARC in the 70s and early 80s.

It's all very "mature", incremental, slow, and me-too.

And so expensive, both financially and in terms of developer time.

I'd love to see a renewed interest in attacking this from both ends - a movement to really push the imaginative limits of what's possible, while also being implacably humane and user-oriented and indifferent to ad tech, tinker tech, and pre-commercialised cloud tech.

[eternityforest]

The giant bureaucracies are doing some pretty amazing innovation. Look at Google's web platform features, Bluetooth LE, etc.

There's just certain things they can't do because their incentive is stuff you constantly pay for all the time.

I'd love to be part of something like old 90s revolutionary software.

But I've noticed close to zero interest from the dev community in anything like that.

Everyone mostly just wants to play with sorting algorithms or write their own small language, unless they're getting paid a whole lot. It's become a sport more than an engineering discipline.

It's hard to imagine Excel or BitTorrent being written now.

Heck, it's hard to even imagine web browsers with JavaScript being written now.

What kind of projects would you like to see/work on?

[pnathan]

a revolutionary project moving forward would be a quality gopher browser with a gopher extension for forms, along with a gopherd.

the basic problem is fragmentation and assembling a community of interest.

[zozbot234]

"New business ideas" are really easy. VC-style hypergrowth towards unicorn status is what's hard, but make no mistake it's always been very hard. Unicorns are rare, by definition.

[tacitusarc]

This is why I like Golang. I think it’s the first time in my professional experience where if I see a package that hasn’t been updated in 3 years, that doesn’t mean it’s abandoned, it means it’s stable.

[christophilus]

Clojure is like that. I love it.

[pnathan]

common lisp is like that.

[pjmlp]

It isn't nice? Back to the 8 and 16 bit home computers, when we had plenty of choice and real fights on the school playground about which were better.

[tacitusarc]

I’m curious what you would classify as a hard problem. Personally, I think writing a good, easy to use Python package manager that both gains adoption and addresses the myriad of corner cases is a hard problem.

[sseagull]

I work in scientific software. I tend to view really hard problems as problems where you don't know the solution, and don't even have a blueprint for how could be solved.

Writing a package manager is hard in some sense, but you have an idea of what it needs to do, what features it should have, and what success ultimately looks like.

But there are problems, large and small, which require new thinking and leaps of faith. There are people working on these, of course, but sometimes I feel they are being neglected.

(and people working on those problems probably make 10-25% of what many FANG developers make...)

[mportela]

> I work in scientific software

I envy you!

[PaulDavisThe1st]

So a perfect use-case for the obligatory XKCD post about "too many standards, invent one more to try to solve the issue => too many standards plus one".

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I don't think standards are the problem.

I think a wave of new standards causes issues like the above, and eventually this gets worked out.

Not all "standards" in practice become standard. We learn a lot of "standards" were bad ideas, and they eventually get tossed out and most people forget anyone was ever trying to make that a thing.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

"Standards" in this case just means "things that I/we developed that we think should be adopted by lots of other people because it's awesome-sauce"

[zozbot234]

You can actually start a Wayland compositor/session in a X window. That plus existing solutions for Wayland network transparency should be enough.

[traverseda]

That's what I'm doing now, but it's a pretty bad user experience and definitely isn't seamless. Also completely breaks any integration with my app menu meaning I have to rewrite all the desktop files to launch the app in cage. I imagine someone will eventually make a seamless wayland compositor for x though.

>That plus existing solutions for Wayland network transparency should be enough.

If you're saying it will fix my x2x use case, well it won't. Wayland's security model fundamentally prevents this use case. Maybe someone will add extensions to it eventually but right now the way compositors handle mouse capture seriously prevents this use case, and I'm skeptical that all the different compositors will agree on a solution any time in the next 10 years...

So I'm stuck using X on both displays for the foreseeable future if I want to use x2x/synergy like functionality, and I'm certain that it's going to become harder and harder to keep using X over time...

[20after4]

Wow and here I was hopeful that Wayland would actually make this kind of thing easier. I'm a big fan of synergy and all it's descendant. Apple just released a similar feature for iOS and OSX. Really surprised this is getting more difficult on Linux instead of easier.

[pjmlp]

Xerox PARC workstations could run Interlisp-D, Smalltalk, Mesa/XDE, Mesa/Cedar, thanks to this little thing RISC failed to kill, microcoded CPUs.

[pmoriarty]

> > UNIX isn’t good enough anymore and it’s getting worse

> Why exactly?

Two reasons:

1 - systemd (which is moving linux towards becoming a systemd OS)

2 - developers and companies moving ever more towards web apps (which will eventually make the underlying OS irrelevant, as the browser becomes the OS) (incidentally, web assembly seems to herald the end of the open/transparent web too, as we're eventually all be running opaque binary blobs on our web browsers)

[amelius]

> 1 - systemd (which is moving linux towards becoming a systemd OS)

Or, a microservices OS.

[DonHopkins]

There's a old book all about just that, which included and popularized Richard P. Gabriel's paper, "The Rise of Worse Is Better":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook

https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

>The year was 1987, and Michael Travers, a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory, was taking his first steps into the future. For years Travers had written large and beautiful programs at the console of his Symbolics Lisp Machine (affectionately known as a LispM), one of two stateof-the-art AI workstations at the Lab. But it was all coming to an end. In the interest of cost and efficiency, the Media Lab had decided to purge its LispMs. If Travers wanted to continue doing research at MIT, he discovered, he would have to use the Lab’s VAX mainframe.

>The VAX ran Unix.

>MIT has a long tradition of mailing lists devoted to particular operating systems. These are lists for systems hackers, such as ITS-LOVERS, which was organized for programmers and users of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory’s Incompatible Timesharing System. These lists are for experts, for people who can—and have—written their own operating systems. Michael Travers decided to create a new list. He called it UNIXHATERS:

    Date: Thu, 1 Oct 87 13:13:41 EDT
    From: Michael Travers <mt>
    To: UNIX-HATERS
    Subject: Welcome to UNIX-HATERS

    In the tradition of TWENEX-HATERS, a mailing list for surly folk
    who have difficulty accepting the latest in operating system technology.
    If you are not in fact a Unix hater, let me know and I’ll remove you.
    Please add other people you think need emotional outlets for their
    frustration.

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Haters-Handbook-UNIX-Haters-line...

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/174904.The_UNIX_Hater...

https://wiki.c2.com/?TheUnixHatersHandbook

>I'm a UnixLover, but I love this book because I thought it was hysterically funny. Many of the war stories are similar to experiences I've had myself, even if they're often flawed as a critique of Unix itself for one reason or another. But other UnixLovers I've loaned the book to found it annoying rather than funny, so YMMV.

>BTW the core group of contributors to this book were more Symbolics Lisp Machine fans than ITS or Windows fans. ITS had certain technical features superior to Unix, such as PCLSRing as mentioned in WorseIsBetter, but having used it a bit myself, I can't see that ITS was superior to Unix across the board. The Lisp Machine on the other hand, although I never used it, was by all accounts a very sophisticated environment for programmers. -- DougMerritt

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485

>mtraven on March 18, 2019 | next [–]

>I founded the mailing list the book was based on. These days I say, Unix went from being the worst operating system available, to being the best operating system available, without getting appreciably better. (which may not be entirely accurate, but don't flame me).

>And still miss my Lisp Machine. It's not that Unix is really that bad, it's that it has a certain model of computer use which has crowded out the more ambitious visions which were still alive in the 70s and 80s.

>Much as the web (the Unix of hypertext) crowded out the more ambitious visions of what computational media for intellectual work could be (see the work of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson). That's a bigger tragedy IMO. Unix, eh, it's good enough, but the shittiness of the web makes humanity stupider than we should be, at a time when we can ill afford it.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

[mportela]

I really appreciate your writing this reply (esp. the links). Thanks a lot, mate!

[kkfx]

>> UNIX isn’t good enough anymore and it’s getting worse

> Why exactly?

Beside the defects well stated in the Unix Hater's Handbook, unix violate it's own principles since many years. Original unix idea was: desktops like Xerox SmallTalk workstations are too expensive and complex for most needs, so instead of a real revolution of an extraordinary outcome we decide to limit ourselves to most common needs in exchange of far less costs. No GUIs, no touchscreen, no videoconferencing and screen sharing [1] just a good enough CLI with a "user language" (shell scripts) for small potatoes automation and a bit of IPCs for more... Well... For more there is a "system language" (C) that's easy enough for most really complex task.

That was a success because no one really like revolutions and long terms goals especially if they demand big money while many like quick & done improvements at little price.

However in few years unix start to feel the need of something more than a CLI and some GUIs start to appear, unfortunately differently than original Xerox&co desktops those UIs were not "part of the system, fully integrated in it" but just hackish additions with so interoperability, just single apps who have at maximum cut&paste ability.

> Sure, but it also requires rewriting a lot of these things, introducing and fixing new bugs... It feels like the good ol' "let's rewrite this program" that quite frequently doesn't live up to the expectations

We need desktops again, witch means not just "endpoints" or "modern dumb terminals of modern mainframes named cloud", but desktop computing, since desktop development is essentially abandoned since many years and even back then was in a bad shape we need to restart from the classic desktops. LispM was ancient, hackish, but are still the best desktop we have had in human history so a good starting point. We have some kind of LispM OS/OE here: Emacs, still alive and kicking so there is something to work with, that's is. Emacs is already a WM (EXWM) have countless features and it's already "plugged" in modern bootloader OSes to have hw, driver and services. It just need to evolve.

[1] yes, you are reading correctly and no, I'm not wrong, I'm talking about the famous NLS "Mother of all the Demos" from 1968 https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY

[tytrdev]

I agree, especially with the statement that Unix isn’t good enough and getting worse.

I feel like that was one of the core assumptions and point of the article, but it didn’t have any explanation beyond “multiple programming languages.” Feels a bit flat to me.