The operating system: should there be one?
@inproceedings{Kell2013TheOS, title={The operating system: should there be one?}, author={Stephen Kell}, booktitle={PLOS '13}, year={2013} }
Operating systems and programming languages are often informally evaluated on their conduciveness towards composition. We revisit Dan Ingalls' Smalltalk-inspired position that "an operating system is a collection of things that don't fit inside a language; there shouldn't be one", discussing what it means, why it appears not to have materialised, and how we might work towards the same effect in the postmodern reality of today's systems. We argue that the trajectory of the "file" abstraction… CONTINUE READING
Topics from this paper
3 Citations
Critique of 'let them fail: towards VM built-in behavior that falls back to the program'
- Computer Science, Sociology
- Programming
- 2019
Critique of ‘files as directories: some thoughts on accessing structured data within files’ (2)
- Computer Science
- Programming
- 2018
- PDF