From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 7024 invoked from network); 17 Sep 2021 01:38:46 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 17 Sep 2021 01:38:46 -0000 Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id EFEC69CABC; Fri, 17 Sep 2021 11:38:44 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 17C5A9CAB3; Fri, 17 Sep 2021 11:38:23 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 8DA289CAB3; Fri, 17 Sep 2021 11:38:22 +1000 (AEST) Received: from darkstar.fourwinds.com (fourwinds.com [63.64.179.162]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 07B549CAB2 for ; Fri, 17 Sep 2021 11:38:22 +1000 (AEST) Received: from darkstar.fourwinds.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by darkstar.fourwinds.com (8.16.1/8.15.2) with ESMTP id 18H1cLWX3320787 for ; Thu, 16 Sep 2021 18:38:21 -0700 Received: from darkstar.fourwinds.com (jon@localhost) by darkstar.fourwinds.com (8.16.1/8.15.2/Submit) with ESMTP id 18H1cL7I3320784 for ; Thu, 16 Sep 2021 18:38:21 -0700 Message-Id: <202109170138.18H1cL7I3320784@darkstar.fourwinds.com> From: Jon Steinhart To: TUHS main list In-reply-to: References: <202109161934.18GJYFsl881498@darkstar.fourwinds.com> <20210916194103.GK26820@mcvoy.com> Comments: In-reply-to Marshall Conover message dated "Thu, 16 Sep 2021 19:14:36 -0400." MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-ID: <3320782.1631842701.1@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2021 18:38:21 -0700 X-JON-SPAM: local delivery Subject: Re: [TUHS] ATC/OSDI'21 joint keynote: It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware (Timothy Roscoe) X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" Marshall Conover writes: > > Separately, for the larger discussion, I think the > abstraction-aerospace-engineering seen over the last few decades comes > from the adage "necessity is the mother of invention." People writing > business logic today are targeting an OS-independent platform: the > browser. Wow. I think that it would be more accurate to say that people writing business logic today are targeting the browser because other people are going through the trouble of porting it to different platforms. Doesn't seem to me the best use of resources given that browsers are more complex than operating systems. And I've had many an experience with things that are not portable among browsers. Of course, given that firefox is trying to die by regularly alienating users and that to a first approximation much everything else is chrome or chrome based, you're effectively saying that people are targeting a single operating system even though we don't call a brower an OS. And while there's no going back, I think that browsers suck. Doesn't seem that anybody had the foresight in the early days to realize that they were really building a virtual machine, so the one that we have ended up with is a Rube Goldberg contraption. CSS is one of the brower components that I find especially appalling. I understand its genesis and all that. Would be lovely to be able to make stuff just work without having to "program". Despite revision after revision it's still impossible to lay out things as desired without reverting to JavaScript. While it didn't start that way, at this point there are so many properties with twisty and often undocumented interactions that it would be better to toss it and just write programs. Of course, programming is "hard" and it's supposedly easier to pore though online forums looking for answers to questions like "I think that this can be done but I have no idea how so can someone please share an incantation with me. I personally prefer a language that has a small number of primitives that can be combined in an understandable manner than a huge number of poorly documented primitives that no one person fully understands. And don't tell me that JavaScript is the answer; while it has some good, it suffers from being the dumping ground for people who were never able to get their favorite feature into other languages; it's an incoherent mess. I know that Larry and Clem and I agree on the value of past work. I was a proofreader for Alan Wirf-Brock's 20 years of JavaScript article. I was busy with other stuff when JavaScript began so wasn't familiar with some of the history. Kind of shook my head reading about Eich's big week-long sprint to get the parser up and running. Though to myself that it would have only been a half-day sprint at most had he used existing tools such as lex and yacc, and had he done so we wouldn't still be suffering from the optional semicolon problem 20 years later. Don't mean to offend anybody here, all just my opinion. Jon