Re: [9fans] So What is P9 good for.....

[George Michaelson <ggm@apnic.net>]

To be fair, an awful lot of mass hysteria accompanied the decision to go
Corba. We see a lot of this kind of Millinarial 'at *last* the software
mechanism which will deliver true <x>' chanting around the place. Dare I say
that in my OSI days, I probably chanted quite a lot of it too.

Most interesting to me is the drop in student registrations for I.T. degrees
here in Australia, and a consequent drop in the entrance requirements to get
into an I.T. degree. It never ceased to amaze me I passed my course. To see
people achieve the same paper worth with even less effort is truly
distressing.  As I believe the Bible says, As you sow, you shall reap. Dumbing
down is clearly delivering the inevitable outcome.

Still, there are moments of humour. I just re-wrote some code here to shrink
data using a classic tape-sort alg, iterating over the datastream. It runs
like a greased whippet, its tiny code, and I had lots of fun doing it, and the
advice to try such a simple method came from my erstwhile research director,
a man of similarly jaded views of our times. Meanwhile the small army of
code-orcs I manage beat out the Perl, in true OO fashion.

Actually, there were moments of pain in this last bout of coding. inet_pton()
is the newish function to map IPv6 and IPv4 addresses from presentation to
network byte order. As you can imagine, managing 128-bit constructs winds up
using a set of unions to see this as 8, 16 or 32 bit quantities, 128 bit
registers being thin on the ground (oh why did we reject VLIW computers?).

And predictably, NetBSD forces at least two of the useful #defines to be
#ifdef KERNEL since they are 'non-standard' while RedHate promotes them into
userspace, useful if alas tending towards the fork-in-the-code solution.

Oh well. ever was it so.


-George