The problem isn't so much Unix, but rather that we have largely failed to evolve it since the days of AT&T System III. The Bell Labs people kept working on Research Unix up to V9 with plenty of great features (like V9 IPC streams) that were never replicated anywhere else, before moving on to the ultimate culmination of these ideas in the form of Plan 9 and Inferno.
Meanwhile Linux has always been a boring SysV Unix clone that only occasionally ripped some features (and in a questionable manner) like procfs, sysfs, epoll, signalfd so you don't have to do the self-pipe trick, inotify, cgroups and namespaces. Stuff that competing systems often did much better.
The BSDs have been quicker to do more novel things, but by far the only two modern Unices to get the memo are DragonFly BSD and Solaris/illumos.
It's a secure microkernelly capability-based OS where each process is basically a virtualised hypervisor; it can run a conventional OS as a user process, but it's also got a Unix-like native personality if you want it. I believe it's nearly self-hosting.
I was waxing lyrical at the Plan9 conference to Richard who I have known for a few years about how amazing the turtle and Logo is/was for classrooms because it could engage with a wider range of children than trying to teach them programming because it stimulated those maybe interested in programming, art, robotics, languages and maths with teamwork and communication skills and even just watching things happening. Imagine my pleasure when he said "I'm glad you appreciate it" and went on to tell me the story of developing it when I had no idea!
I was updating with my personal breadcrumbs when you replied. Richard was a colleague of mine - the plan9 scene leads very quickly to luminaries - I have had the privilege of meeting some very talented programmers who are humble so one day you will be on a webpage and go "gosh, I know that guy"
I'd love to chat more if you'd be willing to drop me a line. My email address is in my profile. Too bad I'm too late for the plan9 scene. I'm fascinated to find this long-running nexus between OS hacking and teaching programming, because that's kinda what I've been up to lately and I've worried some that it bespeaks a lack of focus.
It could be worse; it wasn't very long ago when the dominant "operating system" was DOS, for example.
I personally would love to have a modern Lisp machine. Alas, having lived through the 90's, I'm glad that we at least have Unix. Perhaps someday everything will be unikernels.
It is. Even worse, Microsoft got a designer of an OS (VMS) that practically never failed to build the new one that failed all the time (sighs). Least they learned a few things from VMS...
