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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

Please, please stop overloading well-known terms like 'operating system'. This is simply an application platform, much more akin to something like the JVM than an operating system. The implementation details are sparse, but at the lowest level this could be a VM+language, and at the highest level simply a set of libraries. Calling it a "data analysis operating system" is akin to calling Ruby on Rails a "web application operating system."

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I think that the line between "operating system" and application framework is a bit fuzzy, to say the least. I would argue that the Java VM is exactly an operating system to the code that uses it: a system of operation defined by the primitives presented by the VM. In fact, a VM and a set of APIs is all that a "real" operating systems is!

I can see why the title might irk you, but if you read the post, we're not claiming that it's another operating system to list besides Windows, Unix, OS X, and VMS, but rather that we've built an abstraction that has the same power, robustness, etc. for analytic tasks that an operating system does for simple processes.

The history of computing is one of building abstraction upon abstraction -- it's not like we built the OS and we're done.

I hate it when people do this. I don't really mind people breaking language for the purpose of amusement, but this doesn't fall into that category - it's somewhere closer to breaking language for the sake of breaking language, and I don't like that. I like it when words are useful. Things like this and "browser-as-OS" and so on make words much less useful. I will concede that they seem to be using it as a metaphor more than a literal assertion, but it's still irksome.

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