[sunfish]

Typing is nice, and when one is working within an existing system where environment variables are the main way for communicating data between parts of a system (which is many popular systems today), this kind of typing looks like it can add some nice benefits.

The blog post linked here is thinking about how the systems themselves could be designed differently, whether that's OS's, frameworks, platforms, languages, clusters, networks, or other things.

[Animats]

Hm. So, like enums for the web? Or, key/value stores where all key values are known. Who maintains the master list?

[sunfish]

In systems designed for it, communication channels can transmit handles without using a shared namespace or master list. An example of this in the real world is Unix-domain sockets having the ability to send file descriptors across the socket without using a namespace or master list.