Well despite the fact that many of us want to describe our old hero's as philosophical genius's...the fact is, the legacy doesn't include much in the way of philosophy.
That is why we are left with a few generalities that might relate to a philosophy...reject bloat, stay lean, etc.
But you know, one of the common issues, is that the RAM, bus, processor limitations of yesteryear, were understood as limitations at the time. Those were limitations that would have been gladly overcome, had it been practical.
Now, as the last remnants of this old religions, we kind of have a {bleep}ized understanding of what was trying to be accomplished back then.
The original Mac OS was fairly lean...it had to be to run on a machine with 128k of ram and only a floppy drive. But the Mac OS philosophy has nothing to do with being lean (or custom chips, or a specialized bus)...
Mac OS X, could never run on minimal specs, in fact to run it nicely you really need a G4 with AGP....does that mean Mac OS X has no relationship to the original system software? Of course, not...but its easy in the Mac world what to adopt and what to not adopt.
If something is appealing, if it is easy to use, if it doesn't frustrate the user, if it makes you more productive in your work...need to consider that as an option.
I did always like the idea that there is something different about the Amiga. I used to address this very concern, before I realized no one cares anymore. It's about treating the user with intelligence, that they are capable of understanding complex ideas, at the same time, appreciating ease of use.
Does it all sound too generic? Well, the practical application is...did the author of the program make it scriptable..i.e. extensible to the user, allowing at first glance, a newbie to operate it in its essentail features, but allowing the expert user to both expand on it, and even call its functionality from their own programs.
This is an amiga like program... if you want to keep the faith, you expand your amiga similarly. If a program is clearly nothing more than a windows hack, dumbed down in everyway...I don't like it.
Anyway...too each their own. There isn't any consensus of what 'amiga' is, and there won't be now.
