The more I research into Xerox's papers and manuals for Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar systems, the more I become convinced it was a big step back to the industry the adoption of inferior systems like UNIX.
Thankfully many traces of those ideas are now in Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS, Language Playgrounds and many IDE workflows.
The biggest one being a C-centric view of programming that has cost the world untold billions of dollars when dealing with untrusted data. It could have used a statically analyzable functional middleware of some kind, falling back to micro optimization only when needed - the way that Clojure works with say, JavaScript.
The other major failing that I see is overlooking ideas from ZFS, that the filesystem can act as a virtual tree over any storage medium, so UNIX wastes a lot of time on things like dependency hell, permissions, and distinguishing between file and socket streams or local and remote processors. It could have jailed each process in its own sandbox where copies of libraries are reference counted by the filesystem, running in a virtual storage and thread space. We're just now seeing the power of that with Vagrant and Docker (technically it took so long to get here due to virtualization resistance by Microsoft and Intel).
My other main gripe is more about approach than technology. UNIX (and LINUX especially) stagnated decades ago due to the RTFM philosophy. The idea being that to be proficient in UNIX, one had to learn the entirety of the operating system. This goes against one of the main tenets of computer science, that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. So I really appreciate how passionately the Alto tried to make computing and programming approachable to the masses.
I keep hoping someone will release a portable lisp machine that can run other OSs under virtualization and release us from these antiquated methodologies..
That's pretty simple to explain: all those other options were just way too slow to get the kind of performance required out of the hardware available at the time. The difference was simply too large to be ignored.
It's all nice and good to theorize about how the past should have been, but without UNIX you probably wouldn't be writing any of this on the medium you're currently using.
It has its flaws and it is far from perfect but at the time it fit the bill nicely.
The real problem is that we are categorically unable to move on when better options are around. There is a large amount of silliness involved when it comes to making responsible choices in computing, lots of ego, lots of NIH. Those are the real problems, not that UNIX was written in C.
If you compare with Xerox PARC hardware not really, the major issue was the price to produce the type of architecture they were having.
As for safe systems programming, Burroughs was already doing it a decade early in computer hardware much weaker than a PDP-11.
Every 10 years or so the industry just restarts the same loop it's been stuck in since the Amiga (actually the Amiga is probably the first loop starting with the Alto) just with different syntax and faster hardware. Software is stagnant; ALL progress in in hardware. And with the end of Moore's Law that is grinding to a halt too.
And in a way that's a real pity. It could have been that if Moore's law had been a doubling in 30 years rather than 18 months that we'd have had a lot more appreciation for writing good software. As it was the crap won out over the good stuff simply by being bailed out by Moore's law just in time for the next cycle.
But in some alternate universe hardware progress was so slow that any gains had to come from better software.
And stack turtles.
Whenever i see a headline about unikernels, i envision doom running on DOS in a VM on top of Linux on top of some hardware somewhere. How many layers of (potentially leaky) abstractions are we looking at?
The minimal set of reliable human computer interface is a keyboard and a screen. going beyond that quickly add either noise, delays, or both.
I'm not sure it cost anyone anything. I mean, a lot of the OSes were/are written in it, so if you were going to go down that path you'd have to not totally forget to add a rather large benefit in the credit side. It's hard to imagine but programming wasn't always about compensating for not quite understanding how the 17 different frameworks you've downloaded from github and dragged into an IDE worked by just getting a faster machine. Once upon a time people had to carefully measure how much to unroll the loop, or how small a lookup table they could get away with before the errors become a problem.
Edit: I've changed the link. Thanks for letting me know about the bad redirect, golergka. The jwz link looked fine to me; it's pretty obnoxious if the site does a NSFW redirect.
Wikipedia has an objective and some structure, whereas HN is, for all its uniqueness and value, not an organized activity.
Heh, and while writing this it dawns on me that it may well be that he is about OSX because UNIX. Meaning that OSX is a BSD derivative, that in turn is derived from the historical UNIX. While on the other hand Linux is just a bastard clone.
Because it hit me that i have seen some similar fervent anti-Linux sentiment from other UNIX people, related to either the BSDs or Solaris.