[mananaysiempre]

Executable-images-and-bytestreams (Research Unix, Plan 9) and everything-is-in-$LANGUAGE (Lisp machines, Emacs, Smalltalk, Oberon, Forth) environments seem largely contradictory to me, because much of the flexibility in Unix seems to come from the freedom to ignore as much structure in the data as you want to, while programming-language environments seem to derive their advantages from expressing the structure in as detailed a way as possible. (In particular, they really want to invent their own storage formats for everything.) I don’t have much of an idea about Inferno, but my superficial impression is it also mostly ends up as a single-language island.

Which is annoying, because both of these approaches produce some really attractive results, so I’d very much like to learn about any attempts to reconcile them.

[zozbot234]

"Expressing structure" is just a higher layer on simple bytestreams. Some historical operating systems only supported special-cased "file types" with hard-coded structure, but the *IX folks found out that the simple bytestream is enough.