

Why Skin-Deep Correctness Isn't, and Foundations Matter - uros643
http://www.loper-os.org/?p=448

======
egypturnash
I'm about seven paragraphs into this and the one thought that comes to my mind
is this:

The perfect is the enemy of the good. \- Voltaire, possibly.

Sure, the OS could have been rewritten from the ground up to behave according
to this guy's Laws Of Sane Personal Computing. But that would probably take
ten years. (And maybe it's nearly time for an effort like that to start, given
that the original Macintosh System lasted about sixteen years before
everything was thrown out to start OSX.) Add it in bit by bit and you can work
out the actual implementation details, growing it from both the top and the
bottom of the OS. And the end user gets the benefit of an "imperfect" but
functional implementation of these ideas for the, I dunno, fifteen years it'll
take you to core out the old OS while it's still running, and dump in some new
chunks that do the Right Thing all the way down at the deepest levels.

I wish this guy the best of luck in building a functional OS from scratch that
does the Right Thing. It sounds like it could be pretty cool, albiet kind of
mind-twisting to get used to using. (It feels alien to modern computing
paradigms in pretty much the same way a lot of Jef Raskin's visions were,
IMHO.) But in the meantime, I'll be over here using the half-baked version
Apple implemented.

------
mycroftiv
I've been reading this blog intermittently for quite a long time, and despite
a lot of good conceptual thinking, I believe the author fails to understand a
lot of principles which are equally important to the ones that he espouses.
Maybe the most important is independence of layers - the author seems
convinced that, as he says in this post, "it is the bedrock abstractions of a
system which create its overall flavor. They are the ultimate constraints on
the range of thinkable thoughts for designer and user alike."

I think this is simply wrong. Certainly, abstractions tend to leak, but the
loper-os guy thinks that you can't create a usable system unless you extend
lisp-like concepts all the way down to the CPU designs. He never seems to
acknowledge that technologies like virtualization actually work to create
independent environments.

~~~
asciilifeform
_> He never seems to acknowledge that technologies like virtualization
actually work to create independent environments._

This is because they _don't._

Environments can be independent in the information-security sense (what you
and others confuse with full conceptual independence) without being
independent in the propagation-of-brokenness sense. Easy example: your power
supply.

Give me, say, a Common Lisp (rather low bar!) environment which is _entirely
uninfluenced_ by the brokenness of x86. [1] Then we'll talk about independence
of layers.

When the last idiot talking about static languages being "inherently
efficient" has vanished, then we'll talk about independence of layers.

\--

[1] For instance: the fact that you need threads at all. On a dataflow
architecture, threads and their attendant idiocies - locking, race conditions,
etc. are forgotten like a bad dream.

~~~
MrJagil
Stop calling people idiots.

~~~
asciilifeform
Stop telling people to stop calling idiots idiots.

------
Dysiode
From this reading Datskovskiy feels like a more radical, less poetic version
of Vernor Vinge.

When he says "Even if you ... plug all abstraction leaks, the lowest-level
concepts on which a system is built will ... limit the heights to which its
high-level “payload” can rise." I'm reminded of the part in a Deepness in the
Sky when Vinge muses on the nature of the increasingly complex and layered
systems which control the ram ships and how no one was ever able to completely
refactor the mess.

------
sedev
"Apple’s OS update clearly has not removed and replaced the system’s UNIX
foundation with something sane..."

And that was where I stopped taking him seriously. This author sounds to me as
though he is complaining that his free pony is dappled, not purebred. His
arguments all sound, ironically, correct - in a skin-deep way. He discounts,
with wincing ease, the evolutionary steps that are the necessary prerequisites
to getting to where we are now. Reading this is like listening to Stephen
Wolfram talking about cellular automata - it is a shining, glittering, many-
tined work of an absolute crank.

~~~
asciilifeform
_> the evolutionary steps that are the necessary prerequisites to getting to
where we are now._

Where under your car's hood have you stuffed your horses?

------
derleth
> “auto-save”, which claims to wipe out the abomination of volatile-by-default
> documents

I have to say, something like this wouldn't be very useful to me. I want more
control over how my mass storage is used: I frequently run systems with
mostly-full partitions, and something like that sounds like a very quick way
to push my system over the edge into constant failure mode.

------
derleth
> “auto-save”, which claims to wipe out the abomination of volatile-by-default
> documents

I have to say, something like this wouldn't be very useful to me. I want more
control over how my mass storage is used: I frequently run systems with
mostly-full partitions, and something like that sounds like a very quick way
to push my system over the edge into constant failure mode.

Before you say my way is objectively wrong, ask yourself whether you really
want to dictate hard rules about workflow to someone you don't even know.

