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

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

[Russ Cox]

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

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

[Boyd Roberts]

From: Russ Cox <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>

> Dodging the C++ bomb shell (quiet, Boyd...

i won't even comment on c++.  i know the stories.

fine reply, russ.

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

[andrey mirtchovski]

On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Boyd Roberts wrote:

> i won't even comment on c++.  i know the stories.
> 

tell us the stories then... part of why people are attracted to p9 is the
history that goes with it :)

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

[Boyd Roberts]

From: andrey mirtchovski <aam396@mail.usask.ca>

> tell us the stories then... part of why people are attracted to p9 is the
> history that goes with it :)

c++ and plan 9 have nothing to do with each other.

i have a reliable source about c++, back in the '80s.

i wasn't there, but my source is/was reliable.

ok, i'll tell you one story:

   programs that compiled one day would not compile the next day

with this sort of reliability, would you choose it as a programming
language -- and that's long before the bloat.

those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it...

Re: [9fans] C++ (Was: Re: Perl5 & kenji arisawa's perl question)

[Lucio De Re]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2000 at 12:15:14AM +0100, Boyd Roberts wrote:
> 
> ok, i'll tell you one story:
> 
>    programs that compiled one day would not compile the next day
> 
<troll>
I watched comp.lang.c++ as version 1 evolved into version 2.  I
also had Zortech C++ version 1, 2 and eventually 3 (for MS-DOS,
and I would still use it today if I wasn't a regular fool) so was
quite interested in David Bright's discussions with Bjarne Stroustrup.

My impressions, going back a long time, were that Bjarne was
unnecessarily arrogant, but far less so than many others I encountered
at the time.

The language?  I still think it is an important milestone and, like
a lot of other things in this wretched industry, it would have
benefitted mightily from discarding its legacy, but would have been
much less successful had it done so (look at Plan 9 as an example
of the reverse, and RC for an extreme instance).

Whether cfront managed to retain its sanity from one day to the
next, Zortech C++ never let me down.  I occasionally teach C++ at
a theoretical level, and each time I get reminded of features I
miss in other programming languages.

OK, so I should be trying [incr tcl], but the documentation is so
unbearably shoddy...
</troll>

++L

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

[Steve Kilbane]

> ok, i'll tell you one story:
> 
>    programs that compiled one day would not compile the next day
> 
> with this sort of reliability, would you choose it as a programming
> language -- and that's long before the bloat.

well, that's not particularly uncommon in the very early days of a
programming language. how many times has ken said they decided not
to change something in the early unix because they now had three
sites with installations? sun learned from that, and allowed java
to continue developing in the early days, leading to the same "problem".

where it becomes a problem is when the language *keeps* changing.

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

[Greg Shubin]

Russ Cox wrote:

> 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.

In my limited experience with Plan 9, I found the "history" just about
useless compared with bash. With bash, I can let the computer grep a few
thousand lines of history, and select whatever is appropriate. With the
Plan 9 cut and paste, I have to visually search, then move from the
keyboard to the mouse and back. Plus I only get a page or two of history.
Also, does Plan 9/rc have [command | filename] completion? I haven't
found it yet. (maybe I should RTFM?)