On Mon, 22 Feb 2021 at 21:03, <ken.dickey at whidbey.com> wrote:

> 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.

Well, broadly keeping this principle in mind was why I ended up
proposing the Oberon system, and specifically A2, in the talk.

Oberon is famed for being a readable, comprehensible system, even by a
single person, even if that person is still a student. It is still
being used for teaching at ETH and I believe in Linz, it still has a
community of users and fans... and judging from the traffic levels and
Github activity, there is quite a lot of R&D going on in Russia. I
have even been invited to an online symposium on the language and OS,
but my Russian is all but nonexistent.

> IMHO, C has been a fine language for device drivers but got into trouble
> with trying to scale up to large systems.

I agree. This is a profoundly heretical view to state these days. For
saying it, I have been told to kill myself on Twitter. I wish I were
joking.

> Perhaps the time has come when it is again useful to look at ways to
> scale, e.g. Smalltalk, to smaller/finer use cases.

Well, yes, that's what I was getting at! :-)

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