What have we lost? [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#81

Post by jka » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 8:39 PM UTC

thequux wrote: post #17

ArtWomb wrote: post #2

This talk looks pretty epic. I'm glad this discussion is being injected into the mainstream. I wish every one had an opportunity to use a network computing environment such as MIT Athena once in their lives. The original plan wasn't simply to grant blanket licenses for science and simulation software to users in the academic community. But create a true edtech platform that could be used to learn anything: languages,…

We've been talking about doing a follow-on talk this year focusing on network computing environments. Plan 9 and Apollo DomainOS are likely to make appearances, but more ideas are welcome.

KeyKOS (and relatives) somehow got my attention a little while back, and seem like they might be somewhere in the space of things you'd find interesting.

I'm not sure how available/installable they are nowadays, but some of their ideas live on in L4 microkernels, apparently.

(enjoying the talk; thanks!)

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#82

Post by lebuffon » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

js8 wrote: post #38

I was recently thinking a bit about how one could create a typed Forth-like system, by adding a 3rd parallel stack that would hold the type on the data stack, and was used for type checking. I really wanted to like Forth (which is very similar to Lisp/Smalltalk systems, even possibly more elegant in some respects), because of the system extensibility, but the stack errors drove me crazy. So if the system had the abil…

Franck done this already for you:

http://www.oforth.com/

Also look at another next generation concatentive language: https://8th-dev.com/ Not object-oriented per se but a very comprehensive protected hi-level language/environment with "Forthy" origins.

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#83

Post by CyberDildonics » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

Reinventing QNX will be cutting edge for decades.

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#84

Post by Koshkin » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 12:49 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #40

XnoiVeX wrote: post #37

What else comes to my mind: OS/2 Warp, NeXT OS, SGI IRIX

NeXTSTEP is pretty much alive.

For some definitions of ‘alive.’

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#85

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 9:59 AM UTC

Koshkin wrote: post #84

pjmlp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NeXTSTEP is pretty much alive.

For some definitions of ‘alive.’

macOS still uses Objective-C, and in spite of Swift love, some key frameworks (like Metal) make use of it.

The new C++ userspace drivers is called DriverKit, most likely in homage to NeXT Objective-C based DriverKit.

DisplayPoscript has evolved into PDF.

WebObjects has transitioned to a Java based framework, that is only used by Apple, and was the basis for J2EE design. Other than that even less people used NeXT for servers than workstations.

EOF evolved into CoreData.

If you want Renderman it is still available.

The UNIX underpinnins never really mattered, in a MIcrosoft kind of way, its main purpose was to bring UNIX software into NeXTSTEP and be a checkpoint on contracts.

So for me it is pretty much alive.

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#86

Post by hestefisk » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

Ologn wrote: post #73

Jtsummers wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never really explored AFS sufficiently to understand why this was the case, but I was always surprised it (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices. "Clear everything off of SharePoint you don't need, we're running out of room." "The shared drive is full, we're going to purge everything not in one of the special directories. See the list." AFS, as used at my university in the 00s, nicely reduc…

> I was always surprised [AFS] (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices. In some ways it was self-fulfilling - corporate offices didn't use it, so there wasn't a great ecosystem, so corporate offices did not use it. There were a handful of vendors, all with drawbacks. On a large network, AFS, or particular cells or filesystems could get into a weird state. It was not like Solaris NFS where most…

Haven’t heard AFS mentioned in years. I was co-admin of a SunSITE back in the early 2000s and we used AFS for mirroring. Whilst it was quite neat, it was quite complex, especially due to the underlying intricacies of Kerberos. It would be great to have a more modern version of AFS with its distributed nature, central name spaces etc but with a truly open, horizontally scalable distributed file system.