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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#821

Post by pjmlp »

mike_hearn wrote: post #719
tjchear wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

The fact that everything is not a file. No OS actually implements that idea including Plan9. For example, directories are not files. Plan9 re-uses a few of the APIs for them, but you can't use write() on a directory, you can only read them. Pretending everything is a file was never a good idea and is based on an untrue understanding of computing. The everything-is-an-object phase the industry went through was much cl…

Unfortunely Microsoft didn't invest heavily enough on COM tooling, it sucks in 2025 as much as in the 1990's.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#822

Post by pjmlp »

Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

Somehow I feel C# has become the right successor to Modula-3 ideas, even if has taken 25 years to get there.

GCC nowadays has Modula-2 as official frontend, not sure how much it will get used though.

XHTML, yep I miss it, was quite into it back then.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#823

Post by pjmlp »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #247
Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

Nice list. Some thoughts: - I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line,…

There is hardly any UNIX stuff for iOS and Android applications sold via the respective app stores.

You won't get far with POSIX on any of the platforms.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#824

Post by pjmlp »

archargelod wrote: post #334
Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

> Modula. Modula 2 and 3 were reasonably good languages. Oberon was a flop. DEC was into Modula, but Modula went down with DEC. If you appreciate Modula's design, take a look at Nim[1]. I remember reading the Wikipedia page for Modula-3[2] and thinking "huh, that's just like Nim" in every other section. [1] https://nim-lang.org [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3

Swift, D and C# are also quite close to Modula-3 in spirit and features.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#825

Post by pjmlp »

eloisant wrote: post #539
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #281

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

I wish Flash would have died sooner. It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser. Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

Thankfully now we have WebAssembly/WebGL/WebGPU for that.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#826

Post by mikewarot »

_bent wrote: post #559

Lytro light field cameras. The tech was impressive and the company was able to put two products on to the shelves, though unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers. But now with the new Meta Ray-Bans featuring a light field display and with new media like gaussian splats we're on the verge of being able to make full usage of all the data those cameras were able ca…

The problem with the Lytro was that the sensor/lens pair was just too darned small. If they had somehow scaled it up so that the sensor was about 4" in diameter, even if it meant using an interposing frosted glass plate or something to allow a smaller image sensor, the depth of field effects could have been fantastic. It would have allowed genuine and beautiful bokeh across almost any arbitrary focal plane, even pan/tilt, in software.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#827

Post by mikewarot »

dlcarrier wrote: post #612
Havoc wrote: post #363

Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context. Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.

Check out Lazarus ( https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ) an open-source spiritual successor to Delhi's development environment.

Lazarus/Free Pascal is mostly awesome!

The bad part is the horrible legacy documentation system. 8(

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#828

Post by mikewarot »

kesor wrote: post #311

Skype ; Because my R.I.P. grandma was using it to talk to her relatives overseas just like she would use a phone, but it didn't cost an arm and a leg (unlike phone calls).

I used skype because Ward Christensen insisted on it... now both are gone. 8(

My friends now use Discord, and it's an acceptable substitute, like Skype it's always pushing a ton of features and updates I didn't ask for. ;-)

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#829

Post by mikewarot »

Metamine had a amazing demo[1], which is only still with us on the Internet Archive. I've fawned over it before[2], but suffice it to say it was a normal programming language plus a magical equals which kept the left side of an assignment updated after the fact, for the life of the program. (Along with the normal non-magical one) The amazing part is that the author, Ymte Jan Broekhuizen, had coherent rules figured out for mixing declarative and imperitive programming. Figuring those out is a minor miracle in my mind.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20201014024057/https://www.youtub...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#830

Post by mike_hearn »

pjmlp wrote: post #821
mike_hearn wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that everything is not a file. No OS actually implements that idea including Plan9. For example, directories are not files. Plan9 re-uses a few of the APIs for them, but you can't use write() on a directory, you can only read them. Pretending everything is a file was never a good idea and is based on an untrue understanding of computing. The everything-is-an-object phase the industry went through was much cl…

Unfortunely Microsoft didn't invest heavily enough on COM tooling, it sucks in 2025 as much as in the 1990's.

Sure, why would they? COM was rendered irrelevant by the move to the web. Microsoft lost out on the app serving side, and when they dropped the ball on ActiveX by not having proper UI design or sandboxing they lost out on the client too. Probably the primary use case outside of legacy OPC is IT departments writing PowerShell scripts or Office plugins (though those are JS based now too).

COM has been legacy tech for decades now. Even Microsoft's own security teams publish blog posts enthusiastically explaining how they found this strange ancient tech from some Windows archaeological dig site, lol. Maybe one day I'll be able to mint money by doing maintenance consulting for some old DCOM based systems, the sort of thing where knowing what an OXID resolver is can help and AI can't do it well because there's not enough example code on GitHub.

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