[comp.os.linux.misc] Help wanted, Plan9 a piece of junk!

[dhog@plan9.cs.su.oz.au dhog@plan9.cs.su.oz.au]

avg@postman.ncube.com (Vadim Antonov) writes:
>The ideal system is "functionally complete" in regard to the
>class of applications.  Then there wouldn't be ugly extensions
>and creeping featurism.  Note that this approach is kind of
>contradictory to the pure minimalism, which is to do absoulte
>minimum to solve the problems at hand.

The only problem is that you need an infinite amount of storage.
A "functionally complete" system must be able to understand all
the file formats of the world (audio, video, data compression, MS
Word documents etc) including ones yet to be devised.  It must
contain all the applications that anyone ever wants to be able to
use a computer for, including ones yet to be devised.  No system
can provide all the functionality that users are going to want.

Look at X windows.  It is a system which _tries_ to be functionally
complete.  Yet every new release provides yet another batch of ugly
features that were "missing" in the last.  The toolkit & widget sets
try to do everything for the programmer, who is forced to spend
hours writing messy code which describes just what the widgets
should do, only to find that some bug in the libraries takes even
longer to find a workaround for.  This pattern is duplicated by many
other software systems, written by well meaning programmers
with your philosophy.

So Seventh Edition Unix didn't provide support for networking.
Can't really blame its authors, networking was pretty non-existant
in those days.  I suppose that in another 10-20 years, people like
you will be bemoaning the fact that the original versions of Plan 9
didn't include support for (say) direct brain interfaces, so that there
are multiple conflicting implementations of them...