I not always agree with Rob Pike, but this one is a must.
"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."
We could’ve gotten something more like a simpler Swift if some attention was paid to state of the art in language research and implementation. No nil, composable errors, integrated generics, sum types, etc.
If you like language archeology, compare K&R C with the state of systems programming languages outside Bell Labs, in regards to safety and language features, since JOVIAL was introduced in 1958.
Hence why there is a certain irony towards the opinion UNIX is done, yet the efforts towards language design are as they are.
Plan 9, Inferno and Limbo came to be, and that was it.
"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."
-- https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...