Laura's theme (Long) (Was: [9fans] I've got 4 student intern (undergraduates) here.)

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

Apologies for taking Laura Creighton's name in vain :-)

On Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 02:13:56PM +0900, okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp wrote:
> 
> When I tried to show it to our students, yes, I also felt it's not easy to do.
> However, as I know Plan 9 is very easy to maintain system and users, and
> to write programs, I started to do it by reading papers such as "Plan 9 from
> Bell Labs" etc. with them.
> 
My enthusiasm was certainly fired by the papers, it was a long time
after I discovered the first set of Plan 9 documents that I was given
a chance to look at it.

> Today, I asked Yoshitatsu what was his first impression of Plan 9 when he
> touched, and his answer is that it was "then, so what?". :-)  I understand it,
> because Plan 9 doesn't have "killer application" except of acme. which is
> only for programmers or system maintainers.  However, he is writing Plan 9
> application now.  However, this is not accepted by many of Japanese _SOFTWARE_
> companies, if any... (sigh)
> 
Based on my somewhat narrow view of the computer field in the last few
years, there have been very few killer apps: Lotus 1-2-3 (a better
Visicalc, I should imagine), the web browser, MS Office (in an odd
sense); underrated, but susprisingly significant (in my opinion, of
course) are Quake and Microsoft Outlook.

Quake is to Linux what 1-2-3 was to the IBM Personal Computer.
Without it, I believe, Linux would still be as much of a curiosity as
Plan 9 is today.

Outlook is important because it is practically transparent.  Most
users are unlikely to know whether it is the Office version or
Express as delivered with Internet Explorer.  All Outlook users seem
to believe that everyone else is also using Outlook, a bit like all
automobile drivers assume that all other automobile driver knows what
a steering wheel is.  This insidious penetration is Microsoft's
strongest marketing ploy.

Plan 9 has too many of these aces up its sleeve.  Like Linux, it
should concentrate all its efforts on a single one, but of course,
like with Linux, it is its community that defines the direction
development takes.

Without excluding myself from the criticism, the Plan 9 culture is
inherently elitist, rather than evangelical.  I'm about to embark on a
cross-host debugging session (Inferno, rather than Plan 9, I'm not
sure how successful I'm likely to be) and only when confronted by this
need, did I realise that Laura's question about impressing students
should have been answered by a cross-host task, the more convoluted,
the better.  No one else has proposed such an idea, and yet the main
strength of the fileserver approach lies clearly in that quarter.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: ..."  I really love that
phrase.  Plan 9's strengths are so self-evident, even we can't see
them anymore :-)

++L

PS:  The jist of it all, is that ACME is Plan 9's killer app.  If we
could turn a Plan 9 system into a cross-platform (hardware _and_
Operating System platform, that is) development tool, it would
doubtlessly eclipse the current IDEs.  Porting Limbo (Alef) to the
popular platforms (thank you, Bell-Labs and Vitanuova for Inferno,
it's a pity we have to ask for more), with Acme, RC, the Plumber and
MK, would be a great start.  But these are not market oriented dreams,
they address a more ideal than realistic world.