Re: [9fans] Re: Perl5 & kenji arisawa's perl question

["Russ Cox" <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>]

Dodging the C++ bomb shell (quiet, Boyd!), I think I 
would summarize my view of the feeling by saying that
Plan 9 provides you with a new perspective on how
to implement various things that in Unix are taken
for granted as the ``only way to fly''.  

The bash features you cite are a great example: instead of 
endowing the shell with command completion, history 
using arrow keys, and emacs command editing, Plan 9 puts
roughly equivalent capabilities in the hands of the window
system: you can edit any text in any rio window, cut, paste,
etc.  The feel is different, but now it applies to _all_ applications,
not just the shell, and without requiring everything to link
against the GNU readline library.

Similarly, the editors are of a different flavor: simpler, 
less to understand, but just as powerful when you do.

Plan 9 is neat because most things that are part of
the center of the system have been rethought and 
redesigned at least once more than Unix counterparts.

At the same time, no one is going to argue that Plan 9
is complete: there are plenty of things I want to be able
to do that I can't.  Reading news is one of them.  But if
someone were going to expend the effort to get news
running on Plan 9, I'd rather see a file system presentation
than just a port of trn.

Bringing in tools from Unix usually happens because they're
needed for some particular job: I have a perl binary because
I had to run one Perl script with some frequency when I was
working with a die-hard Perl fan on a project.  I have cvs
because I had to use it for a project last summer.  The 
TeX and Moscow ML ports happened for similar reasons.
That's why vncviewer exists too.

Those have been brought in because no one wanted to think
about redoing them, and they were needed.

Things like csh, sendmail, vi, and X we have replacements
for, and they're good examples of the Plan 9 approach to 
cleaner solutions for old problems.  If you were going to
use Plan 9 without using rc, upas, and rio, it really wouldn't
be much different from Unix.

Russ