He not implying impermanence is an effective primary argument for killing a community, as in "This community is impermanent, therefore we must destroy it" in a vacuum. Additionally, humans and communities occupy different ranks in a moral hierarchy. I'm not sure your point is coherent.
What do you mean? America has 2 offerings from Chevy, and now the Slate truck as well. Japan has the Nissan Leaf. Korea and Germany produce a few cheap EVs too. None of these vehicles are large and all of them are focused on being cheap for the mass market. The PRC's offerings rely on favorable currency positioning and extremely apathetic labor conditions (leading to better cost-efficiency). It's not an industrialist's miracle.
> Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability.
On the contrary, Lisp outshines C to a large degree here. Success has nothing to do with technical merit (if such a thing even exists), it's not a rational game.
Reduce is a Lisp library that's still in active use from 1968, making it older than C itself. We can point to GNU Emacs as an ancient and venerable self-contained Lisp tortoise with more wrinkles than are finitely enumerable, and is in fact a hosted Lisp operating system. Pulling it apart and working with it is admittedly a treat even if I loathe it as a text editor. Mezzano is a modern Lisp OS that you can play with in a VM, and might give you an idea of why Lisp is such a great systems language.
In short: Lisp is semantic and geared towards a living system. The basic REPL is sh + cc + ld + db (and a few others) all in one. It's almost a little mind bending how nice these systems are put together, how cleanly they work. C is like pulling teeth in comparison.
I'm not even a fan of Lisp or sexpr languages. But it's the obvious heavyweight champion of longetivity and ultra-pragmatic service record... Yes, even in the systems domain.
Both of which are besides viability. It's just a usable system that gets you an idea of how an OS works when it's Lisp all the way down. It didn't invent this idea, it's just a modern example of it.
You're close! I'd recommend checking out this blog post which frames it as such and goes into motivations and how the architecture ends up panning out at a high level:
> Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.
Correct. You can swing productive usage of Durden and the rest of the kit in its current state, but it's still an experimental piece of software under active research and development. As it stands, it's more attractive to daily drive xorg as a default while keeping arcan around to hack on and experiment with.
It's been rapidly closing the gap towards usability over the last few development cycles. I can speak for myself as tentatively waiting for 1.0 before abandoning xorg totally, which is at least a few years away.
> It was arguably the ideological opposite of the American dream – its aims not exceptionalism but reasonable living standards
What on earth does this person think American Exceptionalism and the American Dream is about? This is the kind of line I'd expect from bad faith rhetoric drummed up by a state actor playing a marketing game, not an Anthropologist writing a serious article. The level of cultural and historical ignorance on display is astounding.
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