Personally, I think this is a very dated position to take.
All computer language save exactly what the processor reads is completely synthetic, a fantasy that we all mutually support to make our lives easier. We've seen machines based off of a variety of underpinnings that directly model languages above them, so even that underlying representation is somewhat fluid and subject to interpretation.
I agree that sometimes people forget about how much infrastructure surrounds them, but I also think that people working in lower levels of the code sometimes forget that their job is ultimately to make it so no one else every has to do what they are doing. Ideally, every layer completely fades away into the previous layer and you end up with a unified front which we call a runtime environment.
So maybe this complaint is like a Matryoshka Doll. As he hacks on his OS-level code in assembly and lectures people about how they shouldn't take his work for granted or steal his names, a lower level software or hardware engineer is saying exactly the same thing about his post.
If the age of a position negatively impacts its correctness, we should re-examine Newton's Laws :)
I guess that most anything is 'somewhat fluid and subject to interpretation', but I still find it difficult to understand how a software engineer can conflate the idea of an OS (which essentially manages computer resources) with a browser.
"Dated" doesn't mean old, it means old-fashioned or somewhat anachronistic by modern standards.
All he's really talking about is a "runtime environment" when he says OS. What we consider the bare bones of a modern OS is, by standards set 30 years ago, irreparably full of excess and waste. Even if you look back 10 years features have been added which were once impractical. The feature creep all software experiences means that over time, what's considered the "bottom" of the software hierarchy is constantly reaching up to the top.
And it gets really complex when you start talking about emulation. Is an OS suddenly not an OS when it's run in software emulation? What about virtualization? If the resources it manages are fictions, does that change what it is? And then you get into insular environments that certainly could be made to run on bare metal environments if you wanted to, like Lisp and Smalltalk. Where do they sit?
Maybe "Operating System" is a misnomer, but it's not far from the truth from the perspective of a web programmer deploying applications to a target over the network.
You have some interesting points. But just because something runs on bare metal doesn't make it an OS (many Amiga video games tossed the OS for example). An OS running in s/w emulation is still an OS. It manages resources for the apps, it doesn't matter what lies beneath - same goes for virtualization.
All computer language save exactly what the processor reads is completely synthetic, a fantasy that we all mutually support to make our lives easier. We've seen machines based off of a variety of underpinnings that directly model languages above them, so even that underlying representation is somewhat fluid and subject to interpretation.
I agree that sometimes people forget about how much infrastructure surrounds them, but I also think that people working in lower levels of the code sometimes forget that their job is ultimately to make it so no one else every has to do what they are doing. Ideally, every layer completely fades away into the previous layer and you end up with a unified front which we call a runtime environment.
So maybe this complaint is like a Matryoshka Doll. As he hacks on his OS-level code in assembly and lectures people about how they shouldn't take his work for granted or steal his names, a lower level software or hardware engineer is saying exactly the same thing about his post.