Comment by chubot
7 years ago
Hm I really like the observation that "systems programming" is overloaded.
I gave my take here:
https://lobste.rs/s/jrzwgy/what_is_systems_programming_reall...
In short, I think shell is actually a more appropriate language for describing systems, rather than OCaml or Haskell! If that sounds weird, then I'll point you to the evidence of shell already being used for this purpose (e.g. the 40K lines of shell in the Kubernetes repo I mentioned).
Although, on reading the blog post a little more closely, we may not be agreeing precisely on the problem.
I should probably write my own blog post about this ... there are a couple I linked that give something a flavor.
It's simple:
Bugs in application code causes errors in that application.
Bugs in system code causes errors in an user application.
If bugs in your code causes problems only to your code - it's single application. If bugs in your code causes problems in other programs - it's system of programs.