Creighton Hogg wrote:
Well, since we're on the subject and it's only the Cafe list, what is it that you find messy about Linux that you would want to be solved by some hypothetical Haskell OS?
This is drifting off-topic again, but here goes... There are lots of things to like about Linux. It doesn't cost money. It's fast. It's reliable. It's flexible. It's secure. However, unfortunately it's still Unix. In other words, it's a vast incoherant mess of largely incompatible ad-hoc solutions to individual problems implemented independently by unrelated hackers over the 40+ years of history that this software has been around. New software has to emulate quirks in old software, and client programs work around the emulated quirks in the new software to get the functionallity it actually wants. One vast tangled mess of complexity and disorder. Exhibit A: Package managers exist. Exhibit B: Autoconf exists. I rest my case. An operating system should have a simple, clear, consistent design. Not unlike a certain programming language named after a dead mathematition, come to think of it... (Have you ever programmed in C? You can certainly see where Unix gets its features from - terse, cryptic and messy.) Still, I don't have the skill to write a functioning operating system - much less one that's "ready for the desktop" - so that's that I suppose... (I did seriously investigate the task once. Indeed, I got as far as writing a bootloader. It worked too!)