>>1035759 (OP)
>>1035830
UNIX sucks too much for its intended purpose as a multiuser OS, but it sucks even for single user PCs. A bad program in a preemptive multitasking environment is never supposed to lock up the entire computer. That goes against 60 years of computer science and OS design principles. A mainframe OS would never "work" that way because it means someone halfway around the world can bring down the entire computer and cause hundreds or even thousands of other users to lose whatever they were doing. UNIX shills were able to push their shitty "OS" onto unsuspecting DOS users who were used to a single bad program bringing down the entire machine.
>>1036542
>And before you ask, there's no alternative based OS not because Ada, smalltalk, and lisp are badly designed, but rather the entire academic and business sector of technology are wrong.
What happened was that "the entire academic and business sector of technology" shrunk. UNIX weenies were a tiny minority and most of their "practices" were considered brain damage by the rest of the world. There were hundreds of different operating systems and a lot of real research and new innovation going on. All of that has been redirected towards "fixing" C, UNIX, Java, the web, and other bullshit that is too broken to fix. The spread of UNIX languages has spread the brain damage into academia and computer companies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493987
>The worst part is that Firefox tried to change the error message it throws to include the "bar" piece of information, and that had to be reverted because it broke sites that were parsing the exception message with regexps. :( See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1498257 for the gory details, though it was not the only site affected: see also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1490772 (fixed by site author) and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1512401 (fixed by the backout).
The UNIX way of parsing text instead of using error codes or error objects is an example of how brain damage can hinder fixing bugs. Firefox can't even improve error messages, which are technically intended to be read by the user of the web page.
>>1036550
>For the first 15-20 years of home computer they needed to be programmed in C or ASM for speed reasons.
Home computers lag behind mainframes and minicomputers, but that doesn't mean x86 should not be allowed to be used the way it was meant to be (rings and segments) or that better systems should become worse to accommodate C and UNIX. OSes written in higher level languages were around since the early 60s. Operating systems written in garbage collected languages were around in the 70s and 80s.
>Now they are fast enough, with enough cores, that someone could try a higher level OS.
That's severely understating it. A PC from the 80s had more RAM than some of these machines. A browser could have dozens of tabs that emulate Windows on x86 emulators written in JavaScript that emulate these higher level operating systems faster (in MIPS) than the original computers that supported dozens or even thousands of simultaneous users. The amount of raw computing power is insane, but you can still completely lock up the mouse and keyboard for over a half hour just by opening the wrong tab in a browser. It's a problem with software architecture and bad programming.
You left out the worst offender of them all - IBM. The
RS-6000 may crank out 27 MIPS, but it can't context switch
or handle interrupts worth sh*t. You can lower machine
performance to the point of unusability by FTPing a file
from another machine on the same ethernet segment!
Next time get a chance to play with an RS-6000, try
this: Pop about a dozen xterms, iconify them, put the icons
in a row, and wave the pointer back and forth over them as
fast as you can. Astounding, no? The highlighting on the
icons will keep bouncing back and forth long after you stop
waving the pointer. My personal record is 20 seconds.
Makes a Sun-2 running display Postscript seem astoundingly
fast.
RS-6000s also have an annoying tendency to "lock up" for
a few seconds (5 < x < 15) and then return to normal - I'm
told that this is normal and due to paging activity. The
microchannel card cage design is pretty bad too - sure, you
can put cards in, but God help you if you have to take them
back out! And you better tighten down the retaining screws
all the way... or the first time you look at the card funny
it will pop out.
To its credit, I must say it compiles GNU Emacs faster
than any other machine I've used, but I do more with a
workstation than just run compiles. And, if you think
Ultrix is bad, it's only because you haven't tried AIX.