This sounds like a good idea at first, but i dare you to take a non trivial Lisp function and "pythonize". This instantly becomes an indentation nightmare. Lisp function calls are highly nested and rarely one per line.
"Climbing Mount Improbable"[1] is the title of a book by
Richard Dawkins.
Haven't read it yet, but I can absolutely recommend "The Greatest Show on Earth"[2].
>>Beside that, I really don't get the point of all this, seriously. Not from a technological benefit, be warned, but from a user perspective the benefit is almost intangible. Why should the average sysadmin care? Linux is a rock solid kernel that does everything, what is the niche that Hurd is filling?
Well, that's debatable.
Linux just crossed the 20 MLOCs bar. Granted, this is mostly driver code which you will only need a small subset of, but still:
Linux is a huge complex blob.
Linus himself said it's bloated years ago[1] and that
it has a high entry barrier for new developers due to its complexity[can't find the link right now].
My guess would be that this is partly due to its classic monolithic architecture and partly due to their developement model[2].
After working with Plan9 for a while I can't help but
take my hat off to the beauty and simplicity of the system.
Especially as a sysadmin your life would be so much easier.
No LDAP, no Kerberos, no NFS, no need to update or deploy software on/to terminals.
But as it stands we're living in a land where every computer thinks it is a Mainframe.
Linux has done a great deal for OSS and will without question be around for quite some time but you have to wonder how computing would look like today, if history had taken a few diffenent turns.
FWIW: Is it just me, or is OS R&D gaining a little more traction lately after it almost stagnated in the 2000s ?
I think there was some serious experimentation in 2000s, just not in the area of popular systems. Plan9 started to hit the news properly around then. A few OSes in managed languages were developed: MS Singularity, and smaller experiments like JNode and SharpOS.
Exactly!
Our brain may be our center of computation but the models it develops of the outside world and hence about itself are based on the signals it recieves from the senses.
