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A comment on Ask HN: If you could 'reinvent' anything what would it be?.

Re:Ask HN: If you could 'reinvent' anything what would it be? by jrockway on Monday July 27, 2009 @02:53AM (#725504)
UNIX. Not everything is a stream of bytes.
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Re:Ask HN: If you could 'reinvent' anything what would it be? by derefr on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:16AM (#725580)
But everything can be serialized to a stream of bytes. UNIX (and moreso Plan9) is REST for OOP.
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Re:Ask HN: If you could 'reinvent' anything what would it be? by jrockway on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:19PM (#726601)
The problem was that everyone wrote their own serialization formats, and called them all the same thing. (Example: mbox.)
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Re:Ask HN: If you could 'reinvent' anything what would it be? by derefr on Monday July 27, 2009 @09:22PM (#727200)
If they had URLs or GUIDs back then, they could have made magic cookies (the four-byte signatures for file types) a lot smarter. I wonder if we could reinvent those?
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