The Story of Unix - Chapter Ω: The Captains All Jumped Ship

There used to be this philosophy, that some people called an Operating System, ... The people who came up with the idea weren't so besotted with it as those who followed and they set out to do it better. That was called Plan-9 from Bell Labs. Ever since the Unix ship has just been sailing around, who knows where? Don't ask any of the crew. And Plan-9?

Unix came with a new programming language and a new way to write programs, by composing them together using shell scripts. Plan-9 didn't. The Viewpoints Research Institute STEPS project was the sort of thing Plan-9 needed, but Viewpoints was terminated in 2018.


 See Condensing Programs for more on functional components.

See also these parts of the STEPS project: KScript and KSWorld: A Time-Aware and Mostly Declarative Language and Interactive GUI Framework by Yoshiki Ohshima, Aran Lunzer, Bert Freudenberg and Ted Kaehler and Open, extensible composition models (extended abstract) by Ian Piumarta.

Douglas Hofstadter gave a talk at University Vienna in September 2015 related to this idea:

 

48:06 On those two types of categories, centripetal and centrifugal, see Uncommon Finalities in William Irwin Thompson's book Gaia: A Way of Knowing (1987). 

58:31 I know even less about Chinese typographic design, but I would be willing to bet that they have a language to describe how a character is formed from elements, and that the designer interprets these elements in order to compose individual characters. It's as if a European type designer used nouns like descenders, verticals, loops etc. to describe characters, so a capital letter D might be described as "left-vertical full right loop" and a P as left-vertical upper half right loop. Then the same description interpreted in different ways gives you different type faces. The interpretation is quite technical though and ultimately is expressed in terms of mathematically defined curves like Bezier splines and parameterised so that the shapes vary with the size and density of the font. See Daffodil at 1:05:11. The point I am making is that it is not one universal language which is the ur-typeface, but that by inventing languages to describe type we define the mathematical spaces in which they can be said to exist. And the same holds for computing machinery.

See Douglas Hofstadter on Recursive Functions and The Abstraction Ceiling.

Subscribe to Peter Kindermann. 

See also How Could One Unify CMU and MIT.

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