I’m a Ph.D. student exploring novel programming environments. The main thing I’ve learned so far in my graduate studies is that the languages aren’t the problem, and the programming environments aren’t either (at least not directly): it’s the operating systems that are the problem. Unix and friends are decent abstractions and resource managers over the hardware, but are inadequate for facilitating communication between programs and inadequate for user-defined composition of programs. Unix brainwashed us into thinking that a pile of bytes is the correct medium for IPC. We need something better!