Re: EuOS - Some thoughts
I dunno . . .
I agree with Peter Blue about software bloat. For years I noticed
that whenever I got access to a faster computer, everything went
slower, because it had to do so much more. My old Radio Shack model 1
would be ready to go before it's screen could wake up, and for simple
text, and spreadsheets, it's still not really been beaten. No bells
or whistles (no sound) no gui (no graphics) and no real headaches.
All I ever wanted was more memory, higher resolution, and a colour
monitor.
What I noticed was that the software bloat was generated by people
not wanting to do simple things. Typing "run wp" was too much
trouble, and typing "run wp c:\myfile.txt" was way too much trouble;
they wanted to "point and click". The infrastructure that could
translate a click of a mouse when the cursor is on an icon into the
command to run a word processor is enormous - way larger than the word
processor. Hence bloat.
The thing that Peter is proposing - a system that you can basically
just ask a question of, that will respond with an useful answer,
seems to me to be not a simplification but an enormous complication.
Please indulge me as I wax a bit philosophical here - but
intelligence is very difficult to insert into computers, AI is BLOAT.
And to what purpose? People are intelligent - surely it's easier for
people to formulate intelligent questions that would fit into a dumb
computer than it is to make the computer smart enough to respond to
dumb questions.
I like Euphoria because it stands in opposition to those trends that
tend to bloat everything. It's not that Euphoria will answer your
questions, it's that Euphoria makes the search for certain kinds of
answers a pleasure. The recent trend has been to have bloated special
purpose software that tries to do everything. You can make drawings
in word processors and send mail from paint programs. Euphoria is
instead stripped down generalist software that can do anything, given
some work.
Programming in Euphoria is a joy - I really have fun at it. The joy
and fun of it means that I'm building up a skill that allows me to
implement my own software tools quickly as I need them. I think that
this is a new thing in the world - a wonder. Bloated OS's let us
pretend that we don't have to know anything to have "power". I like
Euphoria because it's a tool that it's worth learning to use, not
because it does things that I don't need.
My old Model 1 used BASIC as it's OS. All the OS calls were just
BASIC commands. I think that this is the best kind of OS, and
Euphoria does it very nicely.
Bye
Martin
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