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Comment by hardtoreason | Hacker News Reader

I literally stalled on the first sentence where he asserts without any rationale that an OS written in Lisp "would be a good thing in itself".

WHY

WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK THIS MATTERS

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I would, and it's based on a pretty simple philosophical/moral/spiritual belief:

Anything that increases and improves our knowledge of the universe - including knowledge of how to best use existing tools, and which tools to use for which jobs - is a good thing in and of itself (barring exceptions related to negative externalities which don't apply here).

I don't know if that's the author's rationale, but it's the one I would use.

Conversely, why would anyone think that because a thing doesn't matter to them, it shouldn't matter to anyone else either?

I think that if you were to poll the users of an OS about what matters to them, the language it was implemented in would be at the absolute bottom of the list.

It may matter to the author of the article. That's fine. To the users? I'm pretty sure that hardtoreason correctly reflects their attitude.

And if you're writing an OS, but don't care about the users? Well, write it however matters to you, because you aren't likely to have users who care, because you aren't likely to have users at all.

> And if you're writing an OS, but don't care about the users? Well, write it however matters to you, because you aren't likely to have users who care, because you aren't likely to have users at all.

Counterpoint: Windows 10.

Touche. (Though even with Windows 10, my larger point still stands - nobody cared what language it was written in.)

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