| I would very much like to laugh at Andy Tanenbaum and we all should. He deserves to be ridiculed because he was being an a-hole. He was putting down another programmer based on a theoretical mumbo jumbo when he could have proven his theories by actual programming. I think it is obvious that any scientist that can prove his theories in a practical way must do that and should not flame and criticize another. In areas where theories are harder to prove like astrophysics, social science, economics, etc. I guess people can debate and flame. We are all used to economist flame wars by now. But in areas where theories are practically provable, such criticisms are useless and idiotic. If Tanenbaum thought microkernels were so great he should have made a usable microkernel OS. This also shows a very negative practice in the software industry which should be discouraged. And this is the criticism of the thing that is working now in favor of some new shiny project that is still in development but it will be all so great when it comes out. It is a very easy pitfall to get into, because the thing working now usually has some problems and disadvantages while the shiny new thing that does not exist yet is usually perfect in every way. But in practical matters, one usually does better going with the thing working now. But worst of all, this practice of worshiping the nonexistent solution is usually used to strike down newcomers and disruptors. By the way, unikernels have absolutely nothing to do with microkernels. So, no the day of the microkernel has not arrived and there is no indication that it will come any time soon. Maybe there will be a practical working microkernel based os some day. I have no idea what will happen in a thousand years or ten thousand years. But if that happens it will be more of coincidence than evidence that Andy Tanenbaum is some kind of genius living in the future. If you have long enough time frame a lot of predictions about the future will eventually happen in one way or another. Regardless, Linus never disputed the fact that microkernels are theoretically better. He just knew how impractical they were because he actually buckled down and did the work to make a useful OS instead of bloviating on theory. |