> Windows XP is "only an operating system" but has more than 60 million lines of code. Here is an unfair comparison: Squeak is a late-bound dynamic OOP personal computing system in which its OS, UI, development environments, and its many applications (including email, DTP, presentation, network server, sound and movie lab, etc.) require only about 220,000 lines of code in total. This is because there is some "dynamic math" as part of Squeak's metasystem and system that allows some of the important relationships to be expressed more directly, simply and powerfully than in most systems. There is so much more that could be done that what remains constitutes an exciting edge of the art research project on its own. For example, the Squeak team is pretty
sure that the current 220,000 lines of code could be reduced to no more than 40,000, and there is a good argument that the current system should take no more than 10,000. Such a re-rendering of an entire system would be a tremendous accomplishment in higher level programming and would greatly increase a programmer's leverage on new problems.
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