I've been thinking about OS design a lot lately, and typing up notes in a CouchDB wiki-type-thing I'm fooling with. If we ever get around to it, it might be good to combine our materials in a distributed knowledge base to get a feel for how such things work in practice. (We could've used that in the Tunes project about 5 years ago

You've put a great deal of effort into documenting the myriad parts comprising a real-world global computing environment, and how they all fit together.

In other words, I'm mad

You're just using the chemical names as placeholders until you work out the boundaries between parts and which parts are actually needed... right? I'd find it a lot easier to follow along if the pieces were referenced something like this:

I dunno really; I've not given too much thought to the longer-term naming plan!

The story of the theme is this: I was sitting there wondering what a good name for the project would be, when a big gas tanker lorry drove past, with "ARGON" written on it, and I thought it sounded good.

And then just as Java wrung the 'coffee' theme dry, I decided to do the same with the periodic table

Each name has some relevance to the function it performs. Hydrogen is really the building-block from which all other atoms are made (plus a few neutrons to hold it together); Helium is just a small thing that builds on Hydrogen. Gold has connotations with quota management, as it's used as a token to represent value. Iron is a bit more tenuous, but it's sort of a strong, stable, framework to tie large structures together with, and there's the possibility of a rather bad pun on "an ion" being a serialised Iron value (analogous to Python's pickles). I can't remember what made me choose Chrome for a language, probably just some metaphor of putting chrome-plating on top of the low-level hydrogen VM to make it easier to program. Lithium is the framework for reacting to events, that drives the high-level behaviour of the whole thing, since Lithium is a very reactive metal. Caesium from its use in atomic clocks, thus relating to scheduling. Iridium arose because it's between Mercury and Tungsten in the periodic table, and it's the common functoinality shared between the two; Tungsten has connotations of strength and inviolability, as it's alloyed into steels to make them tougher and has a very high melting point, so it seemed a good name for a replicated data storage system; while wolfram (even though it denotes the same element) is a nod to the Bible of clustering, "In search of clusters", which uses a theme of packs of wolves versus the multi-headed dog Kerberos to explore SMP vs. clusters, and various cluster-related software packages since have made homages to it. Carbon as the global knowledge base, as carbon is the structural skeleton of most large molecules, with other atoms hanging off of the side; so the idea of a tree structure made of Carbon with bits of Iron hanging off of the leaves appeals! Iodine started off as a set of standard interfaces for people (and person-like objects) within the system, so was indeed originally about things like identification (and the chemical relevance being purely that the symbol for Iodine is "I"), but as I tinkered with it, I realised that the set of properties that people share with other objects such as assorted bits of hardware and software (now there's a cynical statement...) was quite large, so it was becoming increasingly unrealistic! Neon for UI stuff is simply a reference to neon signs being brightly coloured and attracting the attention of people to tell them stuff, and Fluorine for gatewaying to the outside world because Fluorine has a very electronegative ion that binds aggressively to other atoms.

But yeah, I should make the naming clearer. I can modify my Wordpress plugin that puts the links in to do that, actually... in the text, I just write HELIUM and it does the rest (similarly, all the Wikipedia links are C (programming language) et al). Good point, thanks!

Also, I think you'll need a few more parts... O global/galactic/universal data store;

C will do that. Names are just one kind of data, that happens to string the other kinds together into a meaningful whole.

Oxygen implies a kind of live-giving reactivity... perhaps Oxygen can be the name of a drive to actually implement things, rather than a software component!

Pu FFI

I was thinking radioactives like 'Pu' would be the unstable release candidate series

You're just using the chemical names as placeholders until you work out the boundaries between parts and which parts are actually needed... right? I'd find it a lot easier to follow along if the pieces were referenced something like this:

H hardware abstraction; He executive; Au GC~~; Fe data model; Cr HLL; Li dispatcher; Cs job scheduler; Ir transport; Hg RPC~~; Wolfram cluster communication; W transactional distributed store; C naming; I identification; Ne UI toolkit; Fl gateway;

Also, I think you'll need a few more parts... O global/galactic/universal data store; Pu FFI