gwern comments on Open Thread: December 2009 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: CannibalSmith 01 December 2009 04:25PM

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Comment author: gwern 08 January 2010 02:03:47PM 0 points [-]

That assumes MS ever goes far enough that the FLOSS world feels any gap that could be caught up.

MS rarely does so; the chief fruit of 2 decades of Microsoft Research sponsorship of major functional language researchers like Simon Marlow or Simon Peyton-Jones seems to be... C# and F#. The former is your generic quasi-OO imperative language like Python or Java, with a few FPL features sprinkled in, and the latter is a warmed-over O'Caml: it can't even make MLers feel like they need to catch up, much less Haskellers or FLOSS users in general.

Comment author: whpearson 08 January 2010 03:51:07PM 0 points [-]

The FPL OSS community is orders of magnitude more vibrant than the OSS secure operating system research. I don't know of any living projects that use the object-capability model at the OS level (plenty of language level and higher level stuff going on).

For some of the background, Rob Pike wrote an old paper on the state of system level research.