SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985

It is a bit hard to explain in an HN comment something that requires live experience, You can start by having a look at, link "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" link "SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985" ▶ this video You can see how NeXT builds on many of these concepts on the famous "NeXT vs Sun" marketing piece, link Sun also had some ideas along these lines with NeWS, "NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System," link Naturally OS/2, BeOS, Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Android share some of the ideas. Now, before I proceed note that actually modern Linux distributions have all the tooling to make these concepts happen, but it fails short to have everyone agree on a proper stack. So basically, the main idea is to have a proper full stack in place for developing a Workstation computer as one single experience, from bottom all the way to the top. On Xerox's case, they used bytecode with in-CPU execution via programmable microcode loaded on boot, and later on just a thin native glue on top of host OS. The environments had frameworks / modules for the whole OS stack, supported distributed computing, embedded of data structures across applications (OLE can trace its roots back to these ideas), REPLs that not only could interact with the whole OS (commands, modules, running applications), it was also possible to break into the debugger, change the code and redo the failed instructions. Linux distributions get kind of close to these ideas via GNOME and KDE, but the whole concept breaks, because they aren't part of a full OS, rather a bunch of frameworks, that have to deal with classical UNIX applications and communities that rather use fvwm (like I was doing in 1995), and use a bunch of xterms, than having frameworks talking over D-BUS, embedding documents, all integrated with a REPL capable of handling structured data, and call any kind of executable code (including .so, because the type information isn't available). And then every couple of years the sound daemon, graphics stack or whatever userspace layer gets redone, without any kind of compatibility, because it is open source so anyone that cares should just port whatever applications are relevant. It is quite telling that most Linux conferences end up being about kernel, new filesystems, network protocols, and seldom about how to have something like a full BeOS stack on Linux. Even freedesktop can only do so much.

In baseball and other sports, pros and cons of different styles are readily and honestly talked about, even when coaches have a bias. See e.g. link for table tennis. Few comparable articles in programming exist; either people can't conceive of other styles or contexts, or just want to talk about the superiority of their bias regardless of context. If downsides are mentioned at all it's often not about the preferred thing, but some deficiency of something else. A commonly made up deficiency attributed to Lisp is that it's particularly bad at large scale, either in teams or program size. That would surely be surprising news to the teams doing stuff today or in the past, some responsible for multi-million lines of code systems (some still in operation). Or to use an old example, the documentation for Symbolics Computers, pictured here in book form: link Such a set of books doesn't come from a "lone wolves only" ecosystem and heritage. Not to mention doc and so on not shown for applications they made for 3D graphics or document editing (▶ this video)