I cringed when it was talking about the relative size in terms of "coded in assembler vs. coded in C". OSes didn't bloat because of coding practice, they bloated because of features and resources. Let's look at resources: a typical graphical resource on a Mac Plus was a 1-bit 32x32 icon. That is 128 bytes. An icon in Mac OS X is about 350 times larger. Even though System 6 was a "graphical" operating system, it wasn't graphical by today's standards. A typical program back then may have had a program icon and a splash screen and maybe a dozen other graphical resources. In a modern application, you have hundreds or thousands of graphical resources, ranging from button bar icons to textures. It used to be that "help" was a paper manual and not online. Now programs hardly ever ship with a manual and depend upon copious amounts of online help. On top of all of that, extra features will add more of the above and more code. In comparison, moving from assembler to C would be a rather small contributor to bloat.