Toward the Future of Personal Computing System Construction

The software for today’s personal computing environments has become so complex that no single person can under-stand an entire system. Our group’s early experiences with personal computing led us to understand that the essen-tial model of personal computing can be expressed much more compactly. Our group engaged in a project (called the STEPS project) to materialize that vision over the last six years [1]. Several interesting results came out of the STEPS project. There are various meta-language implementations [2][3]. A new stream-processing language called Nile was invented. The syntax of Nile allows a fully-featured vector graphics engine called Gezira to be written in a clean, mathematical manner in less than 500 lines of code [4]. We also wrote