Alan Kay and STEPS

Alan Kay, the author of SmallTalk, creates an experimental STEPS system (recursive acronym STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems) that can replace the OS. The code name for the system is Frank. Moreover, it is not just the kernel of an operating system like Minix, but a fully functioning environment with a graphical shell, viewing and editing documents, etc.

Basically, all the source code must fit into 20,000 lines of code. For comparison, Windows NT 3.1 took 4-5 million lines of code, the Linux 2.6.0 kernel was 5.2 million. All this is about 18 thousand books. It is clear that no one in principle is able to neither realize nor read everything. But if you fit all the source code of a complex system into one book, then everything becomes much simpler.

How can we fit everything into twenty thousand lines? The answer is metaprogramming and DSL (Domain Specific Languages). With the help of the object-oriented OMeta language, the Nile language of the executed mathematics and the low-level Nothing language, the code is short. For example, the implementation of TCP/IP takes only 160 lines.

This is an interesting concept to bring modularity to the absolute level. It is a pity that this is still a research project.

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

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