Shamar @Shamar@social.cleverlibre.org

Hi, @mjd totally agree.

Given your desires, you might like #Wirth's #Oberon, both as a language and operating system (I do not know if it needs a MMU, though, but to be honest a MMU looks like a quite reasonable hw requirement to me, even just for security reasons).

As for your "free" language of choice, I used to agree more in the past. #Lua is likely a good choice because it's possible to study its implementation in a week, but can we say the same about #C and #Python?

I used to like both a lot but

- Python is complex and its standard library is huge

- C is quite simple (I have no issue with pointers, more with it's syntax, too arcane for beginners) but its standard includes a crazy standard library

In general we should consider any program that requires more than a month to be completely understood in a month broken by design as locked to a few vendors OR an élite.

Thus how broken are #GCC, #Clang, #CPython, #NodeJS and so on?

@EdwardTorvalds

In 1916 everybody were reading the same propaganda.

Now people read propaganda tailored to their culture, class, psycological bias and to the people surrounding them.

This produces a much stronger cultural hegemony and it was made possible by technology.

A technology designed to reinforce the wealth differences while dividing the poors around identitarian tales.

@JauneBaguette

Nice hack! 😃

Sad it's using (thus spreading) the Mercatore's map that draw the equator at 1/3 of the height, magnifying the rich north of the world and depicting the poorest continents (South Ameica and Africa) way smaller than they are.
It's so biased that US and Canada together look bigger than Africa while they are way smaller!

The Peter's map would have been better (but I have no idea of how it would "play" at the piano).

US imperialism as usual. 🤷‍♂️

Yet, still a nice hack.

@vascorsd

To be honest I was thinking about 4 mandatory spaces (no tab, no different amount of spaces, possibly no more than one way to express a computation).

But I'm also thinking of no `if` only match/switch.

@vascorsd

Holy shit, are you reading my mind?

@natecull

A WASM OS sounds like a very dystopic nightmare.

#Wirth's #Oberon is another attempt into this direction.

I think the biggest advantage of these systems (far ahead of their times) is that they assume no difference between user and programmer.

Also (afaik) they were all single-user systems and I'm unable to say if the two aspects are related or this characteristic is just derived by the hardware/culture of the time.

On the other hand, I would not say that #Unix operating systems belongs to the same family, despite being mostly written in C.

It looks like they actually assume/impose a strong separation between user and programmer even just in their perception of the system.

Maybe the multi-user approach is just a further application of this separation.

Nice thread, @natecull, but is this really about programming languages or more precisely about execution environment (either vìrtual machines or operating systems)?

"What have I learnt?" asks Niklaus #Wirth.
"#Programs must not be regarded as #code for #computers, but as #literature for #humans"

I hope that one day people will really understand and embrace Wirth's legacy.

We will have a better cybernetic world then.

https://video.ethz.ch/conferences/2014/wirth/d40b0ce9-b9fa-4ba3-8dee-cf9d0c6f01a4.html

Nice series on #Oberon

https://rsdoiel.github.io/series/mostly-oberon.html

@pzmyers

I did.

But if you try to unite activists' leaders towards the removal of structural issues they will find way to fight you as an enemy.

Their status, power and visibility come from fighting such issue.

If it was fixed for real, they would loose any role.

@natecull

I'd say that most of current day software complexity is unneeded but it's always either accidental or actively pursued to gain one sort of artificial and undue power over people (reduced to "users") or another.

But both accidental and pursued complexity usually stem from underlying systems (hardware included) that do not provide orthogonal abstractions to build upon.

Imagine if you had to define circles on a plane but with non-orthogonal axes.

The simple x²+y²=r² would not work anymore and you'd have to invent the weirdest tricks to get a formula that works.

And anything you'd have to build on top of such formula would be even more complex.

So the pursuit for simplicity is first and foremost a pursuit for orthogonal axes that can effectively describe any computation (a space that is way more complex than a plane) in the simplest (but exahustive) possible way.

That was what I was looking with #Jehanne, but I'm still unhappy of it.
Not just because of the lack of time to work on it or because of plain (but very expensive) errors like GCC.

It's still too complex and arcane. 😥

@natecull

I'm reasoning about this topic too.

I was wondering how to teach #Jehanne to my daughters (it's pretty simple compared to other OS) but it's still full of arcane words, with ugly syntax and weird semantics.

I'm pretty sure we should know better: what wrong assumptions arr poisoning the future of computing?
(Yeah, capitalism apart...)

Why we cannot even think simpler languages (and systems) without so much glibberish?

All programming languages use weird syntax, one way or another, to "maximize programmer productivity" (for some definition of it, if any) with multiple equivalent ways to express a computation.

All use complex type systems (as system F and derivatives) that most people cannot really understand.
Or they use complex runtime rules to counter-balance the lack of any type system.

All scripting languages use different syntaxes, all use different data format (converging to json, that sucks in many ways...), all have different command line switches...

We can do better for sure!