17 Dec
2011
17 Dec
'11
1:01 a.m.
Another example, from Symbolics Genera (which I've
been spending a
fair amount of time with). The Command line in the Lisp Listener
has a few wonderful features [...]
Perhaps _you_ like them. I remember when they
came in and I really
wished I could turn them off entirely. If I'm typing to a lisp
listener, I want everything I type to be taken as Lisp code, never
(mis)interpreted as some kind of funky non-Lispy CLI. I'm trying to say that I think that a command-line
can be interactive
and helpful, rather than simply passive.
I'm inclined to agree. Difficult to do under Unix, but that says more
about Unix than it does about what makes a good CLI.
But there seems to be this mindset that what Unix has
is perfect and
cannot be improved upon.
Har! The closest you'll find _me_ getting to that is "Unix is the
worst OS in the world except for all the others peopl ehave tried", and
even that is putting it way too strongly. I much prefer VMS's
privilege model, for example, and, while I don't recall it being done
this way back when I worked on Lisp Machines, I really think
filesystems could be eliminated in favour of other ways of addressing
the needs filesystems satisfy.
[...], I doubt anything will change much, things are
too ingrained in
terms of backwards compatibility (both of software and of wetware.)
Yes, I suspect it will take revolution, not evolution.
In recent years, I've come to the conclusion that POSIX, for all the
good it's done, is not an unmixed blessing; anything that can't be
twisted and bent into a POSIX framework sort of "can't be done". For
example, in 2002 I worked with an experimental encrypted storage
paradigm that really fit the POSIX model very poorly, something I was
very aware of because what I was doing was building a glue layer to
make it mountable as a Unix filesystem.
If you do find [Genera] "stunningly
inconvenient" I'd like to hear
from you :).
Heh. I don't. At least not as of the most recent version I used; I
expect it to have gotten worse (in my opinion, of course), but it's
highly unlikely to have got to the point of "stunningly inconvenient".
Honestly, i find Genera an amazing programming
environment,
Indeed. Me too.
You mentioned OpenGenera; is this an open-source version or something?
My (rudimentary) web-search skillz end up at pages that give the
impression the "Open" part is a misnomer, so I don't know whether
they're giving me an incorrect impression or whether someone mislabeled
a non-open product as open (presumably in an attempt to - fradulently,
I would tend to say, if so - ride the "Open" bandwagon).
If there really is an open Lisp Machine OS, I think I'd just _have_ to
build a Lisp Machine emulator....
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