<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 6/18/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Andrew Coppin</b> <<a href="mailto:andrewcoppin@btinternet.com">andrewcoppin@btinternet.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Creighton Hogg wrote:<br>><br>> There are lots of things to like about Linux. It doesn't cost money.<br>> It's fast. It's reliable. It's flexible. It's secure.<br>><br>><br>> Okay, I'm not sure if I'd agree with the reliable & secure points. I
<br>> mean, relative to what could be done. I'm a rank amateur when it<br>> comes to OS work but when I've looked at recent papers Linux really<br>> isn't that cutting edge. I mean, it may be reliable in comparison to
<br>> Windows 98 & has less known exploits than any Windows system, but in<br>> terms of how good it *could* be I think there's an awful lot of room<br>> for growth.<br><br>Isn't there a lot of room for improvement in *any* product?
</blockquote><div><br>Well, I'm not just talking about improvement. I'm talking about things like capabilities, self-healing kernels, separation kernels, exo kernels, things that may have serious advantages but can't necessarily be strapped on to a preexisting kernel such as Linux.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> Okay, but these don't seem to really be design flaws so much as the<br>
> inevitable results of age and the need for backwards compatibility.<br>> I'm looking more for technical problems that you would want to see<br>> fixed in our magical UberOS.<br><br>Technically, both Windoze and Linux "work". It would just be nice to
<br>have an OS with a coherent design, that's all. Nothing revolutionary<br>(after all, it's an OS), just something done properly.<br><br>(Also, have you noticed that no large Haskell applications exist? It's<br>
very hard to convince people that Haskell is not a "toy" language when<br>no large applications exist. Building an entire *OS* with it would<br>rather satisfy that requirement...!)</blockquote><div><br>Well, I imagine that there are large applications being used at places like Galois or Credit Suisse that are just proprietary. As for open source, I guess the largest application is probably GHC itself.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> (Have you ever programmed in C? You can certainly see where Unix gets
<br>> its features from - terse, cryptic and messy.)<br>><br>><br>> This is another thing we're just going to disagree on. I think C++ is<br>> a pretty messy language, but feel that straight up C is rather simple
<br>> and elegant. I had only used C++ before, but a friend rather easily<br>> convinced me that C is in fact a very sexy language when used in its<br>> intended design space.<br><br>To me, C is the pinacle of everything that is wrong with computer
<br>programming. How does the saying go? "C combines the power and<br>flexibility of machine code with the ease of use of machine code."<br>(Which isn't quite fair - machine code is easier to read than C.)</blockquote>
<div><br>At this point I can only say that we disagree and bow out of this tangent. <br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
For some reason, there is this perverse correlation... There are<br>wonderful, beautiful languages like Haskell, that nobody uses and that<br>you can't do anything practical with. And then there are ugly, complex,<br>
messy, flabby languages like C, C++, Perl, VisualBasic, etc. which are<br>what everybody uses, and which have the power to actually do things. As<br>somebody who's spent their entire life obsessively programming<br>computers, this state of affairs makes me really sad. I really wish to
<br>God there was a language like Haskell that was useable in the real<br>world. :-(<br><br>> (I did seriously investigate the task once. Indeed, I got as far as<br>> writing a bootloader. It worked too!)<br>
><br>><br>> Would you mind sharing the code? I'd be interested.<br><br>Seriously - we're talking about 1 page of assembly. That's it. Write it<br>to the boot sector of a floppy, reboot your PC and it says "Hello World"
<br>on the screen. That's the sum total of how far I got.</blockquote><div><br>My apologies, I thought you meant you wrote a GRUB replacement in a functional language.<br></div><br></div><br>