Here’s the thing, I totally agree that the way we currently program for the TTY and its children (TEs) isn’t really great. But, the only reason I think that is because I have seen what can be done when an operating system is ready for graphics from its inception. Namely, plan9. It is still in many ways “for the teletype”, but it has infinitely more power than any other *nix TE I have ever seen.
I would love to see a modern resurgence of plan9 and to have it become a legitimate player for market away from linux distributions; it offers more internal consistency and actually gets much closer to following through on the promise of “everything [being] a file” than Linux ever has.
Unfortunately, plan9 has only a very small following left, and so far, I have seen no indication of its making a come-back. So, in the meantime, I will continue to program for the environment that I have and look for incremental changes that offer improvement (e.g., libsixel).
The message that we shouldn’t limit ourselves is important, but I found some confusion between programming for the teletype era or programming with the teletype era. I wasn’t sure if there was meant to be a distinction.
I doubt my daughter is going to stand for a world in which the only way to reprogram her computer…
Here’s the thing, I totally agree that the way we currently program for the TTY and its children (TEs) isn’t really great. But, the only reason I think that is because I have seen what can be done when an operating system is ready for graphics from its inception. Namely, plan9. It is still in many ways “for the teletype”, but it has infinitely more power than any other *nix TE I have ever seen.
I would love to see a modern resurgence of plan9 and to have it become a legitimate player for market away from linux distributions; it offers more internal consistency and actually gets much closer to following through on the promise of “everything [being] a file” than Linux ever has.
Unfortunately, plan9 has only a very small following left, and so far, I have seen no indication of its making a come-back. So, in the meantime, I will continue to program for the environment that I have and look for incremental changes that offer improvement (e.g., libsixel).
The message that we shouldn’t limit ourselves is important, but I found some confusion between programming for the teletype era or programming with the teletype era. I wasn’t sure if there was meant to be a distinction.
Here’s hoping she’ll be able to.