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I've always loved the Perl idea of "If you want to treat everything as objects in Perl 6, Perl will help you do that. If you don't want to treat everything as objects, Perl will help you with that viewpoint as well." (from http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/docs/Perl6/Spec/S01-overview.po...).

From a traditional OS level this isn't very useful because it's your job to implement the lowest-level capability of storing data. But what if you're already running inside of an OS that provides all of that stuff for you. Then you are free to implement all sorts of crazy abstractions that can directly apply to even greater problems, like network transparency and distributed objects.

Now think of this as PG has with Arc (http://paulgraham.com/core.html) by creating basic axioms for an object interface given the pre-existing facilities of working inside a traditional OS. Something that could run a desktop to running on the cloud and you have some intriguing problems to work on that cannot be addressed by current OSes.

I think there's a lesson to be learned from current database trends. It seems that no one is expecting a database to automatically achieve scalability anymore, so now we have all of those projects that provide a distributed interface to a run-of-the-mill RDBMS (I'm thinking of Amazon's Dynamo work).

So, yeah, throw out the file concept, and everything else that has a chapter title in your OS text book. Then you'll be able to find ways of working in new OS/language concepts and quickly arrive at great problems like the current concurrency terror and cloud computing.



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