| I think that, while the idea is solid (Unix is poorly-designed and we should have better) some of the specific ideas mentioned are lacking: > Everything worked in a single address space, programs could talk to each other in ways operating systems of today couldn’t dream of. No! Bad! We have enough problems securing software on separate VMs running on the same metal, single address spaces are completely out of the question until someone manages to build a feasible trusted compiler system. > Then we add a gazillion programming languages, VMs, Containers, and a million other things, UNIX is a bloated mess of workaround for its own problems. A lot of these problems could happen with a Lisp machine - you could have a billion different Lisps, for instance (although, to be fair, with better (i.e. non-Unix) OS design you wouldn't need containers). > 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. This is partially true, but a lot of the complexity in modern software doesn't come from Unix, but just...bad design decisions. Webtech doesn't really care whether it's running on Windows or Unix, after all. Also, high-level CPUs are a bad idea: http://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html I think the good in this post is along the lines of: text bad, typed IPC good, runtime-aware OS good, standardized VMs good, interactive systems (Lispy stuff, Jupyter) > batch-processing systems (Unix, C). |