Jonathan Blow

Looking more, I see that sbase has a lot of programs in it (it was not obvious from the page), but ... again it's just replicating the unix complexity but making it simpler. That's fine, but the real problem is the unix complexity.

Unix Philosophy was fine in the early days of Unix, but now it's 50 years later, if we don't have a better idea of how to do things by now, we must really suck. Today we see that the system has turned into a huge number of programs, most of which most people don't understand,

that are very hard to use unless you are already an expert, and that, when put together via pipes, result in buggy programs (in the same way that non-statically-typed languages like js result in buggy programs). Meanwhile we also do code sharing with libraries. Well ... why

not simplify to just libraries? That is what I would do.

Then I think I agree. How about an OS where executable code from all sources coexists in a unified way, where a library is simply code and the shell just calls the same functions everyone already has?

That would make a lot of sense.

If 'st' wasn't tied to X, wouldn't it be more complicated? Or do you mean if X was replaced with something simpler, 'st' on top of that would also be simpler.

It would be more useful to more people, and not itself relying on something that is a roadblock to simplification (X is horrible at this point). And the higher levels of the program would be less likely to depend on X's particular quirky model. The program overall would get

a little more complicated, but the payoff per unit of complication would increase by a lot.

It would take a bit more than cutting ties with X for st to become useful to more people since it is tied to other linux/unix stuff. But having a number of applications that run on thin abstractions over crappy Os infastructure would allow for an easier transition once

st is one of their worst. Can't use backspace without a patch. dwm and surf are great, though. They're definetely held back by unix, but their idea of having even the most basic features as patches is stupid. Solving merge conflicts is not an acceptable configuration system.