Add Bracha's "Don't Serf the Internet" to catalog

[jryans]

https://blog.bracha.org/dontSerfTheInternet.html

The same is true of other major open source components of our computing world, such as web browsing infrastructure like Chromium. Nevertheless, these folks are on to something. You should be able to access and change the OS source code - but you should be able to do so much more easily, safely and reliably. If it's mind-bendingly complex, you don't really control it, even if it is open source.

I should note, as I have many times before, that the solution is not a plug-in architecture, or a menu of possible options and configurations, however rich.  There will always be things that the designers of such a system did not foresee.

What does such a system look like? It looks like a system where almost the entire stack, from the OS up, is written in a clean, uniform, high level language that treats code and data as first class constructs and allows you to change them easily, on the fly. A dynamic, reflective language (it can and should be optionally typed, but that is a minor point). 

At the same time, the system needs to be secure by default. Capability-based is my bet. And it needs to run on a wide variety of hardware - desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, watches. Yet it also needs to be able to run on top of, and interoperate with, other operating systems so it isn't a walled garden. The web is the best option for the latter kind of portability at the moment. The system supports synchronization of code and both offline and online: in other words, both synchronous and asynchronous reconciliation.

Suggester: Gnuxie