[Scene: The early 90s, in an office of a certain Silly Valley computer manufacturer]
“I’ve got a great idea.”
“Shoot.”
“You know how old programmers are usually overrun and crushed by the young turks? These kids are fresh out of college and can crank out C and C++ faster than us experienced old farts. I’m sick of that.”
“Me, too. That last intern who re-wrote the kernel page management…”
“Worst review of my life, yup. So, why don’t we design a new language, all whizzy and structured and garbage collected and stuff, and — get this — utterly isolated from the OS.”
“Like BASIC?”
“Right! So they can’t do anything real in it.”
“I get it. It’s a teaching language.”
“No, we sell it as if it was a real language, too. That way colleges are sure to teach it. And it’ll cripple our competitors once they latch onto it.”
“Neat.”
“Now the kids will come out of college knowing essentially nothing about processors, or memory systems, or I/O — hell, they’ll never even have heard of exclusive-OR — and they’ll go into companies thinking they know everything. And in ten or twenty years . . .”
“We keep the castle safe for us. They can’t touch the kernel. We give them a miserable excuse for a native call layer, use blocking I/O everywhere, and give them X-Windows style graphics for user interfaces. Yeah. I like it.”
“What should we call it?”