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0 pointsmpweiher7y ago0 comments

The ~20KLOC of Xerox PARC was the entire system, not just the kernel, and included, among other things:

- the kernel/OS

- the windowing GUI

- the programming language, compiler, libraries

- the visual IDE

- Networking

- E-Mail/Chat

- ...

I am not sure DTP/Word Processing was also included, it might have been a separate system.

Now I am a huge fan of QNX, used it and developed for it a bit in the 90s, but the version that fit on a floppy didn't cover anywhere near as much. Also, QNX is built on a message passing kernel...hmm...

You also left out Amiga Exec + Intuition, which is also amazingly compact and was built in C...but using OO concepts, which are implementable in C. For example, everything in the kernel is a List, and so specific concepts like ports effectively subclass List (with function tables etc.) See also: Objective-C.

Plan 9 is also very, very cool, and its "everything is a file" (no really, everything) is not that dissimilar to everything is an object. Part of my own work[1] is trying to find the common ground between these two approaches, with a good amount of success.

Anyway, the Plan 9 distribution is 1.5 million lines of code. The Acme text editor and cc compiler alone sum to 20KLOC. libdraw is another 5KLOC etc.

So Plan 9 is good, Smalltalk is arguably better, but I think we can (and have to) do better still, see VPRI[2].

Coming back to Brooks for a second: in NSB, he saw OO as one of the few hopes for tackling the problem, and in an OOPSLA panel 20 years later he opined that it had largely succeeded[3].

That said, I agree with your take that software tends to be much, much more complicated than it has any need or rights to be. I attribute much of this to architectural mismatch[4], particularly in the domain of UI-intensive systems[5]

For example, much of the complexity of UI programs can be removed by modeling them using high-level dataflow constraints[6], combined with compositional storage.

Dataflow also seems to be a very powerful reduction factor, Unix pipes/filters still rule (see Doug McIllroy's response to Bentley's challenge), and Dan Amelang's Nile/Gezira does a modern 2 1/2D compositing graphics subsystem in ~500 lines of dataflow code[7]

[1] http://objective.st

[2] http://www.vpri.org

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221321794_No_silver...

[4] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/able/www/paper_...

[5] http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/ehci/ehci2007/Chatty07.pdf

[6] https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media...

[7] https://github.com/damelang/nile

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hmijail7y ago

Regarding [3], I find the paper interestingly underwhelming. Brooks' part of it says that 2 decades have passed (since NSB in 1986) without an order-of-magnitude improvement, and then says "Of the candidates enumerated in “NSB”, object-oriented programming has made the biggest change, and it is a real attack on the inherent complexity itself."

I think this is rather ironic / off-mark, given that the 90s and 00s were so full of OOP - for example, growth of C++ impulsed by Windows, and if anything OOP lately seems to be (thankfully) going back to being just another tool in the toolbox. To me it feels like OOP had its moment/decades in the spotlight, it didn't fulfill hopes/expectations/SB and therefore things keep moving on, in search of that SB. Isn't it? Or is the implication that things were even worse in the 80's?

Note, I'm referring to OOP in the "industry standard" way it's commonly understood, not Alan Kay's message-passing original meaning - about which I'm still trying to learn more.

But, WOW - I just read David Lorge Parnas' part in [3]. I was already reeling from the paper's distilled self-serving, but this guy is crapping in every one, rather directly, and making sense while at it. I have a new hero to research.

[4 - 7] are really interesting, thank you (as is Betley's and McIlroy's mention). And also very interesting to see someone working in those things while developing another iteration of Smalltalk. This is really making me prioritize learning Smalltalk in my to-do queue...

hmijail7y ago

And regarding the concept of architectural mismatch, that goes nicely with another thing I recently wrote about [1]: how applying embedded architectures in high-level languages (Java) seem to yield big gains AND surprise everyone. At the moment I considered it a "lack of vocabulary" in Java, but now I realize that maybe the problem is a bit deeper/more general.

Java's architecture (and architecture idioms) might cause a blind spot (or is it a kind of Someone Else's Problem?); while C's architecture/tools or lack thereof disincentivize overwrought (or plain sophisticated) systems, for good and for bad.

Or more succinctly, Java makes you stop thinking about how things actually work, while C makes you stop thinking about how things should work.

Interesting!

[1] https://hmijailblog.blogspot.com/2018/08/you-could-have-inve...

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0 pointsmpweiher7y ago0 comments

The ~20KLOC of Xerox PARC was the entire system, not just the kernel, and included, among other things:

- the kernel/OS

- the windowing GUI

- the programming language, compiler, libraries

- the visual IDE

- Networking

- E-Mail/Chat

- ...

I am not sure DTP/Word Processing was also included, it might have been a separate system.

Anyway, the Plan 9 distribution is 1.5 million lines of code. The Acme text editor and cc compiler alone sum to 20KLOC. libdraw is another 5KLOC etc.

So Plan 9 is good, Smalltalk is arguably better, but I think we can (and have to) do better still, see VPRI[2].

Coming back to Brooks for a second: in NSB, he saw OO as one of the few hopes for tackling the problem, and in an OOPSLA panel 20 years later he opined that it had largely succeeded[3].

For example, much of the complexity of UI programs can be removed by modeling them using high-level dataflow constraints[6], combined with compositional storage.

[1] http://objective.st

[2] http://www.vpri.org

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221321794_No_silver...

[4] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/able/www/paper_...

[5] http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/ehci/ehci2007/Chatty07.pdf

[6] https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media...

[7] https://github.com/damelang/nile

0 comments

hmijail7y ago

Note, I'm referring to OOP in the "industry standard" way it's commonly understood, not Alan Kay's message-passing original meaning - about which I'm still trying to learn more.

hmijail7y ago

Or more succinctly, Java makes you stop thinking about how things actually work, while C makes you stop thinking about how things should work.

Interesting!

[1] https://hmijailblog.blogspot.com/2018/08/you-could-have-inve...

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