And i don't think languages really help here. Given that many advanced languages have products that are, again, beyond me.
Directly, what sorts of edits do you wish you could do, but feel prevented from doing?
Part of this is that setting up a development environment is kind of tricky.
> And i don't think languages really help here.
They really do actually.
> Directly, what sorts of edits do you wish you could do, but feel prevented from doing?
Imagine an OS where you can do something like "view source" with html, you can edit it, and immediately re-execute it. I think that the list of things I wouldn't look into tweaking would be shorter.
And that is the thing, I rarely want to. Or, I'll want to, but it isn't easy enough to do that I can get it done. Often, the thing I would like to do is a melpa install away. And the amount of code involved with many features is far beyond my skillset, it usually seems.
So can you give maybe a top 3 concrete examples of things you would change?
Do you mean view the kernel's source? Or user program source? Either way, this already exists, it's just often unsuitable for OS software.
That's the point, you don't have much capability to alter the OS you are running. But you should. It's not unachievable but the languages, tools and OS (and maybe HW) have to come together to allow for this.
> Move that to other areas.
Computer is different from any of those since it's fundamentally a machine to model human mind. I always feel like my OS is somewhat restrictive as to what it lets me to do easily and what alterations it lets me to make.
> Now. Do I want to be able to fix what I can? Of course. I run emacs, in part because I like that I can pull up the source, quite easily, of any component I am using. I still rely majority on code written by others. And have no shame or concern in doing so.
Right. But the languages and tools that we use currently don't lend themselves to terseness and correctness. I think that that's the direction of future languages.