[zanny]

The story mentions this. The industry had a working Linux and jumped on board. It is like how the industry jumped on C++, or x64, javascript, or unicode. The small imperfections in form of these tools didn't, at the time of their inception, justify the more massive immediate workload of trying to completely replace them with no backwards compatibility for something without the blemishes. Competitors weren't mature enough to step in, so the imperfect progressions of tried methods took the reigns rather than bolder, newer ideas, that meant shifting some of the inertia of the industry.

I think that might be one of the lesser appreciable legacies of 80s - 00s in software. We have tools that are now really showing their flaws but we built the empire on cracked bricks and the unstable foundations force us to throw more man hours and effort into keeping the whole thing standing than if we just started with a fresh foundation when the better alternatives presented themselves, even if they would have taken some more work.

I still really wonder where we would be if we had a C++ with a clean grammar and Python level readability. Where we didn't try to layer interpreters and JITs over convoluted C ABI compatibility.

[chipsy]

I recommend the "STEPS Toward Expressive Computing Systems" reports for more current-day thoughts on OS redesign (available here http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php )

Basically, by designing exactly the necessary language for each layer, they've reduced the code requirements to reach useful applications by multiple orders of magnitude.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the results of this project eventually creep into industry.

[qznc]

I would be surprised if the results of this project eventually creep into industry.

It sounds great to write vector and font rendering in a few hundred or thousand lines of code. On the other hand, others have been writing orders of magnitude more code in orders of magnitude more time. I cannot believe that has been due to a wrong choice of language or approach. I much more believe it comes from supporting real-world standards and requirements. Loading fonts from various formats, lots of configuration, supporting more and more of Unicode, doing all that optionally with hardware support. That is the tedious part. It is not about how to implement Bresenham's line algorithm most elegantly.