Re: [9fans] Plan 9 and PR

[Dave Lukes <davel@anvil.com>]

> order in the house!!
<aside>There's a great track on the late Warren Zevon's last album
called "Disorder in the House":-).</aside>

> for writing patents iirc.

Yeah, something about needing line numbering:
basically, it did the job, and someone realised that it did,
and used it.

My point was that if we can come up
with a "killer app" that can put a grin on a librarian's face,
then we have a winner.

"Clever" users:  mathematicians, librarians, museum curators ...
(yes, I am being intellectually snobbish: so sue me)
who are dedicated to getting their job done
have always been the most enthusiastic adopters of
useful-but-not-necessarily-mainstream-or-pretty-or-popular
technology.
Mostly I suspect that this is because they are smart enough
to ignore the hype and realise that it (whatever "it" is)
can get the job done.

Also, having an outside perspective means that they tend to lack
the inbuilt bigotries about technology that so-called
IT professionals suffer from
("No-one ever got fired for buying "IBM/Microsoft/Linux ...")
so they'll use whatever works.

I remember teaching regexps to a math prof. about 20 years ago,
so he could update the equation numbering in his papers.

Did he like it?  No.
(The regexps were OK, but He whined that the shell syntax ought
 to have been:
	file < command > file
for elegance and symmetry:-).

Did he understand it and use it because it got the job done?  Yes.

Just a thought:-),

	Dave.

P.S. have you hugged your librarian today?

On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 12:15, boyd, rounin wrote:
> > Never underestimate the power of the word:
> > remember that Unix's first "serious" application was [nt]roff.