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412 points conanxin | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.557s | source
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kkfx ◴[] No.41085082[source]
To be (re)read together with the Unix Haters Handbook https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf to realize that what we need is re-made LispM, Smalltalk workstations or the OS as a single application, framework opened down to the most low level part, in the user hands, fully end-user programmable, discoverable, and fully integrated. A 2D and even 3D/4D CLI as the UI, witch is the DocUIs with eventual 3D and video/multimedia elements.

As a conceptual framework http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf

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lproven ◴[] No.41085282[source]
Riotous applause from the cheap seats
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kkfx ◴[] No.41085635[source]
Thanks :-) but allow me to enlarge, in my poor English: "us" the westerns, we came from those who invented the IT, the modern industry. We are evidently in a declining phase. Evidently someone else try to emerge and actually one of the most prominent new power, China, emerge doing what we have done when we was at the top of the world in industrial, public research, education terms. Meaning such "technical model" works.

Evidently the financial capitalism have worked for a certain period but does not work anymore. So, why keeping committing suicide? We have started to suicide with the WWI. We kept going with WWII and we continue now.

We are still the leader for IT, and we know what does it work, the classic FLOSS/at least open IT model, the one where some sell iron not bits, the one where customers own their systems and bend them as they wish, the one where communication is not owned by some walled gardens but open like on Usenet, classic mails (as opposite to webmails, hiding the decentralized ability for most users who do not own the WebMUA). To continue with the China comparison I've recently bought some battery tools, very cheap crap but enough for domestic usage and I've observed that batteries have a standard connector, I can swap them from different brands issueless, batteries, chargers are "standard". I also own some high end domestic battery tools, who happen to have a damn nfc tag inside the battery tying it to the device, even if inside the battery are classic connected li-ion batteries. The same I observed for BEV, some friends and I have three Chinese BEV from different brands/models and they have a gazillion of common parts. So to say "open/standard pay back" yes, it might erode SOME OEMs margins, but pay back the society at a whole and as a result the OEM itself. The same is valid in software terms. My desktop is Emacs/EXWM, I use as a search&narrow framework consult/orderless/vertico, they simply "plug in" any other packages because the system is a unique application end-user programmable at runtime. You do not need to "specifically support" a package to integrate it. You do not need third party to explicitly support your package to use it together. And what we do instead? Our best to create walled gardens, we have had XMPP, SIP/RTP and now most are on Zoom/Teams/Meet/Slack/Skype/* all walled gardens. Even many push to substitute emails with some new colorful walled garden. Similarly any app try to add features someone else have since it's impossible just using it, like a sexp in a buffer.

As a result modern IT from Unix where the user at least can combine simple tools with some IPCs in script we are limited by cut&paste, drag&drop and not much more. Anything is damn complicated because there are no shared data structure in a shared environment, but any "app" do everything on it's own, often with a gazillion of dependencies who have a gazillion of deps on their own, with a big load of parsers of any kind and even "some standard to pass data" (like JSON) who try to emerge but are still not a shared data structure in an unique integrated environment.

All of this is the old Greenspun's tenth rule and actually is killing our IT innovation, killing one of the last sector we still rules, for the same issues that have killed our industry essentially.

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lproven ◴[] No.41085830[source]
I 100% agree, and your points about Chinese tools are particularly incisive.

As an aside, but I think relevant and you might find it interesting:

A decade or so I discovered Oberon, the last masterwork of the great genius of programming languages Niklaus "Bucky" Wirth. A complete OS, UI and compiler, in about four and a half thousand lines of code.

I have it running in various forms.

I introduced it to the Squeak Smalltalk community, and when I told them what I was looking for:

« a relatively mature, high-performance, small OS underneath, delivering some degree of portability -- something written in a type-safe, memory-managed language, with multiprocessor support and networking and so on already present, so that these things do not have to be implemented in the higher-level system. »

That is how I found Oberon. They told me such a thing did not and could not exist.

I gave them some links and people were amazed.

It seems deeply obscure in, as you say, the West.

But I have found an active community working on it and developing it. It is in Russia.

It may be that in other countries now the target of Western sanctions, we may inadvertently be fostering some very interesting tech developments...

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1. igouy ◴[] No.41087628[source]
> That is how I found Oberon. They told me such a thing did not and could not exist.

Long ago:

https://blackbox.oberon.org/

https://github.com/excelsior-oss/xds

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2. kkfx ◴[] No.41102181[source]
Thanks for the links!