Re: [9fans] Rant (was Re: Plan9 and Ada95?)

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

On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 07:25:32PM +0000, forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk wrote:
>
> >>Let's get off the hobbyhorse of criticising all the alternative
> >>platforms and actually co-operate with them or show that the Plan
> >>9 way is as superior as we make it out to be.
>
> you're possibly overlooking the possibility that some of us have
> written things such as portable compilers (and other things)
> ourselves for a good few other systems, and take that into account
> when making comparisons -- it's not
> just that this or that isn't Plan 9.

My point isn't in the achievements, one would have to be very blind
or inexperienced to fault the contributions made by the Plan 9 team
(in its broadest sense).

On the other hand, continuous criticism (it's an attitude that's
been bothering me for years now) of everything beyond the boundaries
of Plan 9/Inferno, no matter how justified, isn't healthy.

Whether it's GCC, USB, X or Emacs, nobody needs to be reminded that
they suck in some fashion or other.  What we all need are replacement
tools that provide equivalent value with all the advantages of the
Plan 9 platform.  And even more importantly, one needs the platform
to support the user base.  Take my bread-and-butter client:  they
run their computer system under SCO Unix (too shy of Solaris, but
they need multiprocessing power for the COBOL application they are
continually developing) and most of the users are effectively data
capture clerks with terminal emulators on their desks.

The cheapest terminal today is a Win'9x workstation, specially if
e-mail, a web browser, a word processor and a spreadsheet are
complementary, productivity enhancing tools.  They needn't be, but
if the perception is they are, one may as well learn to live with
it.  Then there's compatibility with Word and Excel that is more
critical than the compatibility of the terminal emulator - there's
some control in making the COBOL program not push the terminal
emulator too far, the same cannot be said of e-mail messages and the
spread of office documents.

I could go further, but I'm sure the scenario is familiar enough.
We'd all love to put Plan 9 terminals on these desks, reduce the
cost of onwership, support, need to upgrade etc. by one or two
orders of magnitudes.  But this isn't possible, clearly.  Next
best, coordinate the Win'9x workstation using SAMBA to provide file
services (mostly for backup and information exchange) rather than
the more expensive, more difficult to administer NT.  Can we use
Plan 9 there?  No, again.  More's the pity.

We can learn lessons from Plan 9, centralise file services and
authentication, set up roaming profiles, minimise hardware differences,
lots of hints from the Plan 9 philosophy, but the real thing runs
exclusively on my desk and then mostly in the guise of VNCviewer
(I also use Charon as the browser, wherever I can).

So the reality is that Plan 9 _is_ the superior platform, but there
isn't the appeal in it that draws the software developers to produce
applications that users actually want.  Why is this so?  Because
the bridges to the more popular development platforms are not being
built.  Much as I was horrified that dhog was prepared to port GCC
3.0 to Plan 9 (I was, honestly), it would open a door; Perl would
open another, Python a third, Apache a fourth, etc.  One can improve
on each of these, replace them with more suitable implementations,
later.

So let's not spend our efforts knocking what's familiar, let's
encourage it and then improve it.  There's plenty of effort in
that.

OK, I'd better shut up now, I know this is a boring subject, sorry
to have let off steam at everyone's expense.

++L