System objects vs. application objects (was: Broken dream of mine :( )

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 06:12:00PM +1100, William Leslie wrote:

> 0. Language level object models tend to be finer grained than those
> exposed by the operating system.
> 
> This item is to be taken with a grain of salt, because unix is best
> used when composing simpler processes at a fine granularity. However,
> this does not seem to be the common pattern today, and I think there
> are two different reasons.  Antrik has mentioned before that the
> concept of the monolithic application is designed to serve the
> interests of the proprietary software developer - so the user can
> associate features (that could have been obvious for the user to
> implement had the program been structured better) with the
> application; I think that the resulting impression on modern
> programmers is sadly not going away in the short term.
[...]
> The impression I am trying to give here is that the sort of
> interactivity that Antrik talks about in his post[1] on Deep Mehta may
> be much more applicable when there is less distance between objects
> and functions as the system sees them and objects as the application
> developer sees them.

This is a nice way to put it. I haven't thought about it in these terms
before; but I'm sure it will greatly help me in explaining it and
thinking about it in the future :-)

BTW, I'm a bit surprised that you only linked the older article --
although the recent one more explicitely talks about this stuff, and in
fact you referred to a specific passage from this article in your first
paragraph:

   http://tri-ceps.blogspot.com/2009/06/one-shell-to-rule-them-all.html

-antrik-