From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <11c55d69b002277ef8b5c14a9588e2ea@quanstro.net>
From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:42:37 -0600
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] new compilers
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well, ya, simplicity in this sense is hard to grasp.

"complex" here seems to mean a long enumeration of
possiblities. "simple" seems to mean a small set of operations
that can be composed.  like 9p+mount/bind.  or more
ubiquitously regular expressions.

if you've ever tried to explain regular expressions to
someone, perhaps you know what i mean.

- erik

On Fri Mar 31 03:17:48 CST 2006, nemo@lsub.org wrote:
> We just came back from percom, where we
> gave a couple of talks about Plan B and Omero.
> Perhaps surprisingly, the main problem for
> people to understand what we did was not a
> particular point in Plan B, but the main Plan 9 idea.
>
> When you say "everything is a file", they get scared.
> When you convince them that those "files" are not
> files on disk, and that you exchange data using the fs
> interface, then their main argument is:
>
> 	It's so simple that this probably does not work.
>
> Simplicity seems to be hard to grasp. And also, most
> people IMHO really forgot unix and what interfaces are
> about.
>
> Type checking was also a concern. I think they did not
> understand that a data type (or xml tree) is not a guarantee
> to have the system know about "semantics". They got
> even more scared when I replied that the system should
> best not be involved in semantics (which is up to the user).
>
> So, sic.
>