26 Oct
2017
26 Oct
'17
4:57 p.m.
As an admirer of minimalism, who has given talks that extol
Norman Wilson's streamlining of research Unix, I naturally
like Forsythe's thesis.
I noticed unintended irony in one more or less throw-away remark:
"It is dangerous to place too much hope in any improvement coming from just
following new fashions, if we lack insight into what really went wrong
before. Without that insight, I suspect that rewriting UNIX in C++,
for example, could easily become an excuse for increasing complexity
(because by using C++ `we can handle more complexity')."
Bjarne Stroustrup's avowed reason for building cfront, which
evolved into C++, was to have a tool for building an operating
system in object-oriented style. The tool took on a life of
its own, and arguably became more complex than the old-fashioned
Unix he aspired to improve on.
Doug