On Sun, 21 Feb 2021 at 20:33, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> 
wrote:

>> +10.  Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Incremental 
>> progress benefits from amplifying feedback. An absence of progress 
>> can’t.

> The problem with this is that it leads to a rather toxic final 
> conclusion...
> .. WorseIsBetter

The problem is "final".  _Evolution_ is relentless and continuous.

Thinking back to arguments in _The Blind Clockmaker_, one needs to 
continually observe and refine / replace / clarify.

One does not hear much about dynamic language usage in commercial 
settings because [1] feature evolving faster than your competition is a 
strategic advantage and [2] investors get distracted by "why are you 
using language X" rather than focusing on strategic advantages of 
particular development practices within a business context.

While OS features have tended to feature evolve slowly, placing 
ourselves in a position to evolve our systems should lead to better 
outcomes.  One aspect we have not touched on yet is the modelling of the 
HW systems themselves.

I like to keep in mind Dan Ingalls dictum:

"Reactive Principle. Every component accessible to the user should be 
able to present itself in a meaningful way for observation and 
manipulation."

Being able to present and observe what CPU/GPU/GPIO/USART/USB/.. seems a 
useful exercise for a meta/self-knowledgeable system, especially one 
concerned with hot-plug devices and live updates.

Placed in this context, device drivers and memory systems can be much 
more interesting.

IMHO, C has been a fine language for device drivers but got into trouble 
with trying to scale up to large systems.
Perhaps the time has come when it is again useful to look at ways to 
scale, e.g. Smalltalk, to smaller/finer use cases.

-KenD

[Note also: 
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.84.7354&rep=rep1&type=pdf 
]