It is hard to live without a religion. Each religion comes with its set of APIs, for blessing and cursing, for forking a process child and for being sure a dying process doesn't become a zombie. Religions come with their set of protection mechanisms and their corresponding violation errors and punishments.
Religions are not that different. You can expect most religions to have prescribed tools for common tasks like marriage. The functionality differs a bit, but the purpose is usually similar. What is allowed varies slightly depending on architectural compromises that were decided centuries ago. But overall, all tend to offer similar functionality.
It is hard to communicate with friends and relatives without a common API. Sometimes it just sounds weird to not reply with the known response code when someone tells you "God bless". It just makes the caller to timeout or get a parsing error.
Overall, all religions are meant to make the life safer. You can still program assembly on bare metal, but it is way harder. It is easier to just take a relatively coherent operating system and... hack around it.
There are religion wars and operating systems wars. There are casualties, many of them innocent. A bigger operating system usually wins against a slightly better operating system. Some people can still choose the "slightly better" (for them), but their life is hard.
Sometimes operating systems need to adjust to new realities. What seemed a good idea some time ago becomes a burden today.
But this is where the similarity ends...
This was a pamphlet; I hope the operating systems people will not feel offended :)
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Thank you.
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