[ prog / sol / mona ]

prog


30 Years of Linux

6 2021-08-27 05:19

>>5
I am not trying to silence the critiques of the Unix Haters. But, to extend your analogy further, those who had problems with Marx's vision of economics, put forth their own vision of economics.

We live in world of 64 bit ISAs, with both RISC & CISC machines available that run much faster and have much more memory and storage than those of the Lisp Machine/Multics/ITS eras. To say nothing of virtualization.

But these OSs of the Unix Haters, plenty of whom clearly have talent, have not been resurrected, for the most part. For a while I would read these critiques with some sense of hope, that as much as Linux was better than Windows (for what I wanted a computer for), somewhere out there someone was working on a system that was that much better than Linux.

Now it's two decades later, and there are things like 9front, which is Post-Unix, Haiku, BareMetal, Genode, RISC OS Open, etc. So obviously, if you want to work on a non-Unix-like free OS, and you can make a case for it to other people, you can get it done. There are even plenty of contributors to Mezzano OS, which is on Demo 5, has 18 contributors and almost 5600 commits, the last from 26 days ago.

Now obviously, with Linux having over 5000 contributors, over a million commits, the last just 3 hours ago, it does have an advantage. But it didn't start with that advantage. And I know about Mezzano and the various bare metal lisps and schemes from reading about them when people update forums on there progress.

But I never hear about them in posts from Unix Haters, and the last time I brought them up I got a bunch of "it takes a corporation to make a lisp machine because everything has to be perfect."

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