> 1. Is it possible to write complex, modern applications (things like browsers, photo editors, etc. — things that would take millions of lines of Java or JS) using this style of programming?
If it were a complex application it wouldn't be very forthy would it? Factor the problem instead of trying to factor a preconceived solution.
> 2. What is “sourceless programming”? Where is a good place to learn more about it?
Sourceless programming was used in Okad a vlsi design tool written by Chuck Moore.
> Portability is not important. Portability is not possible. Real applications are closely coupled to hardware. Change the platform and all the code changes. If it didn't, you wouldn't have changed the platform.
> Anarchism is a political ideology that's never met the real world, like a lot of ideologies on HN and elsewhere. This might convince the random Internet reader, but it's not going to convince anyone who has studied the topic.
Although there have been some widespread and fairly comprehensive implementations of anarchism, namely the Makhnovists in the Ukraine and the Spanish Revolution in Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and some parts of the Valencian Community, anarchism is more of a political tension "from where you are standing right now" than an attempt to conquer a territory to establish anarchism. That should follow from the name itself.
The Situationist movement had some enduring effect on French culture from the first-person perspective. (Situationism is not anarchist, but it is libertarian and communist). The Spanish revolution less so, because it was followed by General Franco's rule.
With all due respect I would have liked if the hackernews moderators had kept my original headline "An Anarchist Critique of Democracy by Moxie Marlinspike (Signal SMS), Windy Hart"
I thought this article/transcript was of interest to hackernews in a large part due to one of the two authors being the author of the Open Whisper Systems Signal SMS app.
A smaller contact area between implementations means we need only be concerned about compatibility at that interface and the rest is up to you. This keeps the area of software that we can't change to a minimum.
> Their programming interface is highly standardized across implementations.
It may be easier to have everyone use the same software and hardware platform everywhere. After all we do want interoperability and we do want everyone to play well with others, but, standardization and portability is a push to stop people from trying new things. The push to standardize everything is an unfortunate consequence of not having a separation of concerns, separate concerns such as content and UI.
The web is like an operating system that you are locked into using. This prevents alternative operating systems such as Plan 9 from ever becoming useful, because building a web browser is such a monumental effort. Even if a decent web browser were built for Plan 9 it would defeat the purpose of using such an alternative OS because the web binds software to content.
The web has effectively killed innovation in operating systems. A clean and consistent system will be out of reach as long as this web app nonsense continues.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVMrX6BlNjIeGfX0QcBobGg