From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <092801c10b83$9ca53aa0$c0b7c6d4@SOMA> From: "Boyd Roberts" To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> References: <20010713091130.B8A0D199C0@mail.cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] how people learn things (was architectures) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 12:07:23 +0200 Topicbox-Message-UUID: c9696c02-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > On the other hand, Plan 9 doesn't have many applications like excel or word. > If your main purpose to select your OS is to use such applications, you'd do > MS Windows, I think. This is what I wanted but forgot to say before. yes, this is the 'killer app' theory. i don't actually want excel -- i'll use awk. i don't want word -- i'll use troff. but the problem is that J. Random User wants this 'cos it's shiny and flashy and they can point and click (have it crash on them :) and don't need to know anything about programming or typography. i write code. i grew up with troff. i use windows as a _terminal_. well, i have written code for it, but i needed a job and got conned. in retrospect it was very interesting 'cos i had to learn it from scratch and the constant 'they did what!?!' suprises taught me why it doesn't work and how it's very difficult to write a correct windows program.