Comment by cloudhead
3 hours ago
Thanks for your comment! In terms of concurrent programming in Radiance, it's likely I go for something inspired by Go's simplicity and Haskell's power with STM[0]. Actors are also on the table, but likely as a library on top of the native system, whatever it is. The important thing is that everything that involves "waiting" be composable in this system: timers, network i/o, IPC, file i/o, etc.
For the AI/OS intersection, it is indeed a very interesting design space. The key insight really is that the better the AI knows you, the more helpful it can be to you, so the more you give it access to, the better. However, to be safe, the OS itself needs to be locked down in such a way that personal data cannot leave your device. This is why capabilities-based security is an interesting direction: software should not have access to more than what it needs to operate, and you need fine grained control over that.
If you have more ideas, please write us!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory
Please make a REPL front and centre of the system.
REPLs make computers feel like magic to me.
I agree! I've been thinking about why terminal software is so compelling, and how to make that the default while keeping the system accessible to beginners. I think there's a way to do it, to unify GUI, TUI and CLI.
Take a look at what Rebol did in the late 90s. They have a DSL called "View" for making user interfaces with your scripts. Rebol itself shipped with a program that came with a ton of sample applications including Tetris. The creator of Rebol (Carl Sassenrath) was also big on the Amiga scene and envisioned what he called iOS (internet operating system, not the Apple iPhone OS) where you would do stuff like load a web page by just running the page's Rebol script iirc.
It never took off for various reasons. For one, the language was a bit like lisp, but with brackets. More importantly, it was commercial and then closed source for too long when Perl was really taking off.
Long story short though, whatever language you implement should have extremely high level primitives for simple GUI widgets. Forget Qt and Windows Forms...there HAS to be an easier solution. I can see how Rebol did it and surely you can make something like that possible.