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A Whole New World

Few of us have participated in the creation of our
infrastructure—operating systems, compilers, terminals, editors, etc.,
even though many of us know how to build them in theory. Collectively,
we suffer from a learned helplessness around them: to build new
high-level tools, we'd also have to rebuild some of the
infrastructure, sometimes going all the way down to the kernel. We
can't imagine triggering such a large cultural and technological
shift, so we don't even try to build truly new tools for ourselves.
I've been working on such a stack-busting tool and, though I won't
spill the beans on it here, I'll say that it's required me to
reconsider and change some very old, universally deployed
infrastructure. This talk will briefly demonstrate that project, but
only as an example of the underlying trend: our failure to clean up
previous decades' messes, the opportunities we miss as a result, and
how we might break this cycle.

So... pretty light fare?

Well, I'm excited to see this.

Ditto