>> Has anybody written anything more substantial than Tic-Tac-Toe applets
>> in Java yet?
>
> Java Enterprise applications, anyone?
> OpenOffice?
> Eclipse?
> Minecraft?
>
> Just four examples of non-trivial software from four different domains
> (business software, office software, software development, and gaming)
> that pop to my mind instantaneously.

As best as I can tell, OpenOffice is not "written in Java", it's written 
in C++ and it merely /uses/ Java for a few auxiliary functions.

Eclipse, on the other hand, appears to actually be Java. (I can't say 
I've ever tried to use it.)

And I don't give a stuff what the hell Minecraft is written in. :-P

>> That makes you start to think what /other/ kinds of services you might
>> want the OS to provide. For example, this whole "a command is a file
>> name, and its arguments are strings passed uninterpretted to the
>> program" thing. Surely we can do better.
>
> Like, say, passing messages to the program after it has been started?
>
> I don't see much of a point in an elaborate interface to feed parameters
> at the very moment of startup; after all, the program can't evaluate
> them anyway until it has at least "started up a bit", so pushing the
> same information into a message queue seems to be pretty equivalent to me.

If the command shell knows stuff about the syntax that commands expect, 
it can do helpful stuff for you before the command even runs. (E.g., if 
the third parameter is a number, don't do filename auto-complete on it.) 
There are lots of commands that have "sub-commands"; the shell could 
list them for you. And so on.

> Unless, of course, we'd go all the way of allowing programms to pass
> around full-fledged Java objects to children, parents, or any other
> program they happen to have a handle object for.

Well, yes. When your OS is written in the same language as your 
development language, you can do random stuff like that.

Exhibit A: Smalltalk.

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