food 4 thought : Specialized Operating System for Programming

Basic needs of Programmers:

• Editor is one of the most basic needs of any programmer.
• Version Control systems.
• Automated Build systems like make, CMake, SCons, Ant.
• Open-Source libraries like GNU C library, Gtk.
• Shell scripting.
• Basic Web/File browser - Specialized for browsing forums, IRC chat.
• A simple mp3 playback utility.

I strongly believe most of the softwares in future gonna be written in this way.

There will be a low level functionalities written in C language(What I call App-specific Kernel), and this functions will be binded into a high level programming language API(predominantly python) to define UI, and to write plugins(the actual application apparently). 

So what I'm thinking now is why write separate low-level Kernel? Write a single package that is enough for the above listed functionalities, and then use a scripting language like python, lisp, perl etc. to write the application. One such application at present is GNU Emacs and Blender3D.

Components:

 
Misc...

• UI defintions are done in scripts.
• Minimal hardware support like Keyboard(importantly) and mouse.
• Support for testing frameworks.