
Look Ma No OS (On Squeak and no OS) - soundsop
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=239339
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schtog
You want me to use Smalltalk? OK I downloaded Squeak and plaed ayound with the
cute MINI-OS-GUI-platform-thing.

Ok very different from what I had done before. Seemed to make easy stuff hard.
Of course that could just be me not being used to that type of programming.
How long does it take to learn Squeak, I mean to really learn effectively?

Is there a way to use Smalltalk as an ordinary programming language? Is there
somewhere I can go to download and get going fast?

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jcromartie
Squeak has a learning curve, that's for sure. The language itself it easy, but
the environment is so different that it takes some getting used to. I would
recommend Squeak By Example (<http://squeakbyexample.org/>).

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ced
I don't get the No OS bit. Why not call it an OS and claim: it boots in a few
seconds? Then, make it run C code, and voila, you're set.

Are we ever going to move beyond Unix?

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orib
The point is that it's supposed to be a Squeak VM running directly on
hardware. (So converting the VM to a CM -- Concrete Machine; yes, I did just
coin that term). Running C code would mostly defeat the purpose.

Also, in a way it is an OS, but it's an OS that does nothing more than run
what used to be a single userspace VM, so.. unless a VM is a userspace OS, it
feels kind of funny to say that this is an OS...

Essentially, this is an OS-free VM, or a single VM OS. Both are correct.

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davidw
Cool, but... this is one of the "problems" with Smalltalk and Lisp, in terms
of the mentality. Instead of focusing on what 99% of developers need, they
work on doing turtles all the way down, and go into business competing with
Linux, Windows, et al.

Now, from a pure tech point of view, what they're doing is cool, interesting,
and worthy of praise. Just that they shouldn't complain if they wonder why
they're not as popular as Ruby, Python and friends.

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jhancock
The idea of eliminating the OS isn't about "competing" with Linux or another
OS. The idea is that in some cases you simply don't need a full traditional
OS.

Ruby and Python have there place. They started as scripting languages and
matured from there. If you haven't done serious work in Smalltalk you don't
have the understanding to compare. Smalltalk did certainly provide 99% of what
most developers needed. The reason Ruby has taken market share and Smalltalk's
market share seems smaller has little to do with comparing choices between the
two.

Smalltalk's ascent was throttled because of the promise of Java. Ruby has
risen in large part due to the fact that Java has not lived up to its promise
in certain aspects. Could Smalltalk have made a stronger comeback instead of
Ruby coming on strong? Maybe...but that a complex discussion.

To those that were inside the Smalltalk community when Java came on the scene,
they know that Smalltalk died essentially because Sun had no revenue model
against Java and could give it away for free. All three Smalltalk vendors at
the time sold per seat licenses for the technology. Their business models did
not allow them to rapidly change and give it away for free. This is the core
of the reason along with the fact that Sun had lots of money to throw around
to convince people they knew what they were doing.

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davidw
It's certainly a complex discussion without one answer, but my point is this:

> The idea is that in some cases you simply don't need a full traditional OS.

The number of those cases is quite limited compared to the number of cases
where developers are perfectly content to develop on top of an OS. Therefore,
investing effort in the limited case rather than in the common case is effort
most likely not wisely spent.

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musiciangames
Both points of view are valid, and both are represented in the Squeak
community. There are projects to make 'businessy' frameworks to harness the
power of Smalltalk for conventional applications. There are also lots of
people who love Squeak precisely because it's so different from their day
jobs. They do what they find fun, and care not a jot if there will be one
other person who might find it useful. Sometimes this is frustrating, in that
you feel the effort could be channeled elsewhere, but if it weren't like that
it wouldn't be Squeak.

There will be real world applications for Squeak all the way down, but it
clearly won't be another general ledger or another social bookmarking widget.
It might be an iPhone that anyone can reprogram for themselves, or it might be
a device that no-one has realised they need yet, or...

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s3graham
I just grabbed it and played around. I don't really know Smalltalk very well,
but it's kind of neat, I guess. If it wasn't running in vmware I couldn't
actually use it a real computer for how much you give up. Maybe as a
deployment method along with VMWare ThinApp I could see it being practical?

I'm almost scared to ask, but is there projects that I don't know about to do
SBCLNOS (EmacsNOS?), or PyNOS, or RubiNOS?

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a-priori
Believe it or not, there is actually a Lisp implementation that runs on bare
metal. It's called Movitz:

<http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/>

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jcromartie
Whenever I think about a "next generation" OS, I tend to imagine something
like Squeak. I'm glad the SqueakNOS guys have decided to go with an underlying
Linux kernel instead of doing it entirely from scratch.

