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Comment by throwaway7645 | Hacker News Reader

Early Smalltalk and Lisp systems were those langs all the way down. Using emacs with Common Lisp or using Pharo Smalltalk can give you a feel for this, but not exactly the same thing as a Symbolics lisp machine or the Xerox Alto. Alan Kay has a presentation where he shows the entire OS, word processor, networking stuff, IDE, paint programs...etc was an insanely small amount of code and everything was user configurable. I really wish that had caught on more. I really enjoy Linux (although it ain't perfect). Using Windows and trying to interactively do anything with the OS is an exercise in pain and frustration. If someone could build a modern machine with an OS that is like that and had a few basic apps (web browser...etc), I would be quite happy.

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I don't know if it's just me, but I don't feel like I'm using a computer when using Windows. After using OpenBSD exclusively for weeks (my laptop broke, so I had to repurpose an old netbook with OpenBSD), I felt bored and limited in Windows. I tried Powershell, but -mostly because I don't know much about it- it didn't give the same feeling.

The thing that is working for me is to explore VB.net . It is really an interesting language with many historical features. I've noticed that all the languages I use (Python, C#, Java, Go, etc.) distracted me from the essence of programming. When I started programming I immidiately thought about patterns, architecture, unit-tests, integration-test etc.

In VB.net I feel like I'm slowly reexperiencing the joy I've felt in my earlier days of programming.

you can turn windows into an adult computer by using cygwin (maybe mingw), autohotkey and something like window manager.

the illusion is almost real, because sometimes i also run linux in vmware/docker/... and when i am not paying attention i forget easily which os i am on.

the unix subsystem for win is quite boring as you can't mix windows applications with linux ones, for example running visual studio build from bash.

powershell would be probably worth learning, if i'd have to, but i do not. it may be godsend to win sysadmins though, as classic cmd is a 40 year old joke.

You can run windows programs out of bash (I mean the wsl bash), and you can also create wrapper bat files to use Linux tools/programs from Windows.

i see ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/interop )

that was not possible when i tried it, thanks for pointing it out

True, but it's a hack...not something fluid/elegant/seamless or efficient. I'm not a software engineer. I'm just a traditional engineer that wants an OS written for a power user that allows me to do my job more efficiently. Dealing with a multitude of wrappers is worth it if you're writing production software of course, but not if you write a lot of one off scripts for day to day work.

"In VB.net I feel like I'm slowly reexperiencing the joy I've felt in my earlier days of programming."

Ruby was the first language that I experienced that got out of the way, so I felt like I could think about what I was trying to achieve, rather being distracted by house-keeping. Of the other languages that I've tried, I've only gotten close to the same feeling with JavaScript, Go and Python.

I suspect that a lot of it is to do with your own mind-set at the time: I first learned Python as an applications language, with all of the add-on tools and baggage, and didn't like it much, but recently I wrote a one-file, no-dependency thing to do exactly one job in Python, using just the standard library, and it was a joy.

The difference was, I think, that I did not feel the internal pressure to meet best practices, and could just write the code. For some languages, the stuff that you are supposed to do and the tools that you are supposed to use are a heavy burden.

I've stated on here numerous times that Powershell falls short because pipes aren't text based as in Unix, but are really more like method chaining in .NET. Most of the time I have the output of one command, but can't easily reason about passing it to the next command.

I feel you. This guy is working on an interesting project called the Reform laptop [1]. You might have seen this already. He will eventually have it run his own lisp (called "Interim") all the way down.

[1] http://mntmn.com/reform/

Sounds neat, I'll check this out.

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