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From "The Rise of 'Worse is Better'", written in 1989:

"The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++."

The predicted date was a little early, but otherwise he pretty much got it right. I think that, from a late 80s Lisp perspective, modern Windows fits into the "UNIX" category, and Java/C#/ObjC/whatever are close enough to C++ to count.



>The predicted date was a little early

wouldn't say so - my first Linux machine (slackware, shoebox of diskettes :) i installed exactly in the 95 :)

>from a late 80s Lisp perspective, modern Windows fits into the "UNIX" category

while psychotropic mind-altering effects of Lisp are well known, i'd doubt that it can produce such perception changes or even in such a direction.


Windows and UNIX are not so different. Monolithic kernels written in C or C++, permissions largely done with user granularity, byte-addressed memory, virtual memory with per-process address spaces, no hardware support for tagged pointers or garbage collection.... Compared to the variety that's gone before, they look nearly identical in their fundamentals.




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