Now - this is a cutting edge research:

[Peter Gibbons]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay

http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/html/work/ifnct.htm

The ante has been raised in the 21st century, but most coding today is still done using techniques from the late sixties, with the usual result of millions of lines of complicated, problematic code. On the other hand, the Squeak system, which was derived from PARC Smalltalk, includes its own operating system, GUI, development tools, graphics, sound, Internet sockets, and many applications including Etoys and Croquet, yet is only about 230,000 lines of code. The executables are about 2.8MB and only half of this code is generally used.

This opens the possibility of doing a design much better than Squeak's, both fundamentally and at the user-level, to create a model of an entire personal computer system that is extremely compact (under 20,000 lines of code) and yet is quite practical enough to serve as a system for succeeding versions of the $100 laptop and for embedded systems of the future. This will also be a stepping stone to a complete qualitative reinvention of programming which will be overlapped with this project a few years hence. Our computing models will be partly drawn from our work on Etoys, Croquet, and a new bootstrapping method by Ian Piumarta.

[Walter Mitty]

The original spec for smalltalk fit on something like three sheets of paper.