I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.
A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.
I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs.
There is no system but GNU and Linux is one of it's kernels
Technically, Windows is an "operating system," which means that it supplies your computer with the basic commands that it needs to suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, stop operating.
C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.
Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.
I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.
If you want to write the software to control the national medical system of a large country, Java is perfect.
Qmail out of the box works fine, so people will want to use it regardless of licensing restrictions, even when the software does not ship with their system software.
Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid.
To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.
There is no neat distinction between operating system software and the software that runs on top of it.
