Systems Past: software innovations we actually use (2014)
Read the section &quot;Conclusion&quot; at the end, if nothing else. It is extremely well written. The author throws out some potentially controversial ideas, but he (like many people I have seen) are all hoping for a common outcome - dramatically &quot;rethinking&quot; the concept of the OS and programming language, but really embracing ideas that are as old as time.  I&#x27;ll highlight one section:<p>&quot;Most of all, let’s rethink the received wisdom that you should teach your computer to do things in a programming language and run the resulting program on an operating system. A righteous operating system should be a programming language. And for goodness’ sake, let’s not use the entire network stack just to talk to another process on the same machine which is responsible for managing a database using the filesystem stack. At least let’s use shared memory (with transactional semantics, naturally – which Intel’s latest CPUs support in hardware). But if we believe in the future – if we believe in ourselves – let’s dare to ask why, anyway, does the operating system give you this “filesystem” thing that’s no good as a database and expect you to just accept that “stuff on computers goes in folders, lah”? Any decent software environment ought to have a fully featured database, built in, and no need for a &#x27;filesystem&#x27;.&quot;