Douglas Engelbart

[Oranos]

Is anyone here familiar with Doug Engelbart?
Anyway. I think about him a lot.

http://www.dougengelbart.org/

He caught my interest when I realized I wasn't so alone in how I believe computing should be used and developed for the world.

For example: his concept of bootstrapping is pretty solid. I guess I kinda started towards the principle of bootstrapping when I heard the game engine programmer Tim Sweeney describe his philosophy on the importance of creating new tools to build games faster than ever possible with existing tools. Almost intuitive design decisions alike these are not only keenly observed by Doug Engelbart, but he takes rigorous steps to fundamentalize and uniformly reassemble them as explicit directives of a paradigmatic-framework.

That's only a brief taste of what he describes, but I hope you checkout the website (+do further research around the web) and tell me what you think.

[iansjack]

So, tell us about your ideas and how you are implementing them. How are you revolutionizing OS design? I presume that writing everything in assembler is not the total answer.

[Oranos]

I asked first.

[iansjack]

I'm afraid that sounds as if you have no ideas and are just BSing.

You're the one who brought up the topic of all that is wrong with modern OS design; I think it is incumbent of you to elaborate on that - and tell us what you are doing about it - before asking others what they are doing about the (possibly non-existent) problem. And I won't accept "write everything in assembler" as a reasonable response. Unless you actually have something to say, rather than berating others, that's my interest in this topic finished.

[Oranos]

I'm afraid that sounds as if you have no ideas and are just BSing.

That's clearly the situation with both of us.

Side note:
The topic is Douglas Engelbart, not OS design.

I've removed the offendable remark about these forums from my original post.

[bwat]

If you're interested in bootstrapping then you've probably read my three favourite texts on bootstrapping: "The Art of the Metobject Protocol", "Lisp in Small Pieces", and The Use of Prolog for Developing a New Programming Language.

Here's an interview you've probably already seen with the legend you mention:

He was definitely a man with a plan.

I bootstrap my tools --- programming languages. I've done two so far, each one raising the level of abstraction in which I describe problems:
1) A commercial Lisp was used to write a compiler for my own dialect of Lisp and an abstract machine, then I rewrote the compiler in the new dialect. The virtual machine was rewritten in C as it was the easiest way to increase throughput.

2) A few years later this Lisp dialect was used to write a compiler for a dialect of Prolog and an abstract machine. When the prototype was working, the compiler was rewritten in the Prolog dialect and the abstract machine was ported to C; again this was the easiest way to increase throughput. An ISO compliant run-time system was written in this Prolog dialect. This has become my largest personal project to date.

Back in the old days many hobby programmers had to bootstrap their own tools; just consider all the tiny Basics and the Forths that were developed in the early to mid 1980s.

[Oranos]

Thank you for your wholesome post! Yes, I am familiar with those.

Back in the old days many hobby programmers had to bootstrap their own tools; just consider all the tiny Basics and the Forths that were developed in the early to mid 1980s.

That's the most rewarding learning experience, at least.