Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems

Re:Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating s... by jdblair on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @03:29AM (#22363914)

I came here to write this. VM/CMS was designed for processing structured data. Application UIs were designed around forms to be displayed on 3270 terminals and data was structured around what could be input on a single punch card. It was great as long as this fit your model.

What UNIX gave the world was maximum flexibility: an os that only really cared about streams and got out of your way.

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Re:Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating s... by jstimpfle on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @06:08AM (#22364560)

And in my eyes this is the only right way, because it allows to build structured services on top. If on the other hand the structure is already in the underlying system, it's incredibly hard to build something useful on top.

Similarly, think how useful memcpy() is: Because it can be applied anywhere.

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