7 Apr
2008
7 Apr
'08
7:56 p.m.
On 07/04/2008, Josh Dersch <derschjo at msu.edu> wrote:
I like to quote Jamie Zawinski on UNIX: "Of all
the operating systems
that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot."
Sounds like a paraphrase of Winston Churchill:
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government
except all the others that have been tried."
User friendliness, error handling, and consistency at
the command line
is still a problem -- and this is one of those cases where people don't
even /realize /how limiting that is -- use a Lisp Listener on a 'bolix
for 10 minutes and you'll realize how much better a CLI could be
(command completion, inline help, /helpful error messages/)... same goes
for documentation -- the LispM had graphical, hypertext sensitive
documentation available at a mouse click or a press of the "Help" key
whereas in UNIX it's still man or info pages displayed in a terminal
window, for the most part. This may be less of an issue for the
user-friendly Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc.) which are less CLI oriented.
I know SQR(fsck all) about Lisp Machines, but in these days of
high-powered PCs, would it be viable to create some form of
implementation of the LispM OS on x86? Even if it required some kind
of emulation layer underneath for content-addressable memory or
whatever?
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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