Re: What would a modern LispOS look like?


goose wrote:
Lisp Newbie, so take it easy on the flames :-)

Sure - I'm a newbie too :)

I fail to see how merely using a *language* gives one a better
metric on the reusability scale[1]. OTOH I have to say that
global reusability is not the most important thing, and perhaps
"local" reusability (reusability within a specific environment
or sets of environments) won't be decreased by switching the
OS language from C to Lisp.

Ok, so *nix and C have very good reuse when it comes to libraries. But
that means that the useful functionality needs to be distilled out into
a library. I am imagining that in a Lisp based system would have all
code running in the same image - probably with boundries of seperation.
But two applications that are running can directly talk to each other
just by calling functions. So, for example you could write an editor
and any other application that needs editor functionality could easily
embed that editor inside itself. So Mozilla could use Emacs for all
its text entry. I don't see that happening very much at the moment.
The closest analogue that I can think of is how KDE shares components -
but the Lisp system could be many times tighter.

Also, C libraries need to be reused in a very specific way - the way
that the original designer thought of. With the LispOS you could
cherry-pick the functionality that you like, possibly shadowing
functions that you don't need.

Cheers
Brad

.

Relevant Pages