From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan 9 and PR From: Dave Lukes To: 9fans <9fans@cse.psu.edu> In-Reply-To: <00fb01c3ef06$69baadf0$67844051@SOMA> References: <5e14e61cf2.61cf25e14e@rutgers.edu> <1076327836.26503.66.camel@zevon> <00fb01c3ef06$69baadf0$67844051@SOMA> Content-Type: text/plain Message-Id: <1076330831.26503.143.camel@zevon> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 12:47:11 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: d45e375c-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > order in the house!! > 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.