On: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and d...

[i_don_t_know]

To me, Wirth’s Oberon system has the same philosophy of having small composable tools and being extensible. There’s no distinction between system language and scripting language. Text is also a common way of passing data, but you can use whatever data structure you want. I think of it less as an OS than as an application shell that you shape to your needs.

[dgb23 → i_don_t_know]

There are very different notions of OS and what its responsibilities and capabilities should be.

In the world of Lisp and Smalltalk, you have a holistic view of what computation means. In Unix, complexity is pushed outward.

Web browsers, language runtimes, virtual machines and containers are all examples of people expressing their needs by simulating operating systems.