[9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)

[Corey <corey@bitworthy.net>]

The following is not a troll. (the subject is for the sake of humor only)

On Friday 16 April 2010 11:10:28 Patrick Kelly wrote:
> Have you look at what Plan 9 has done? I would hardly go to say we are
> reactive. Every other system has reacted to what Plan 9 has done, not the
> other way around.
>

However, "what Plan 9 has done"... occurred many years ago.

But what has it done _lately_?  (that's an honest question, not a
troll)

In the mean time, that horrible, over-complex, fugly bloated mess that -
according to 9fans apparently - represents the vast majority of software
(and developers)  in the world... is in fact... _hugely_ prolific, and under
constant development and experimentation: generating untold riches in
wealth in a great number of industries and constantly increasing user and
developer productivity via a rich plethora of options in programming
languages, conceptual models, applications, and higher-level abstractions.
Messy, with high levels of noise-to-signal - certainly... but absolutely,
astoundingly productive and in constant motion.

While the radically simple, perfectly sound Plan 9 continues to focus
primarily at being an IDE and file server... for C programmers... of an
obscure/alien dialect... because POSIX sucks, and UNIX sucks, and all
Standards suck, and all other languages besides C (and rc) suck, and OOP
sucks, and amateurs suck, and higher level abstractions suck, and gui buttons
and widgets suck, and keyboard shortcuts suck, and the web sucks, and larger
scale community-driven collaboration sucks... etc. etc. ad infinitum. Clean,
certainly... but in near/relative stasis as well.

When "less is more" degenerates into "nothing is better than something"
(and "get out of my yard!")...  indicates (to me) that the community involved
could possibly bring in some outside air. (I'm referring to the abstract
community - not each individual, who I'm sure all get plenty of fresh air).
It would be great if 9fans wasn't simply a place where people congregate
partially as means to get their grognard on in full effect mode  - or
alternately, if there was a place for 9fans where they could speculate
productively on greenfield ideas regarding experimental new directions that
alternative Plan 9 _based_ operating systems might be well suited towards.

But here on 9fans, even the basic process of community meta-cognition ends
in that all too familiar "flame drizzle".

To be honest, it's a shame that Plan 9 appears, for whatever reasons, to
be firmly entrenched within the context of a particular school of C systems
programming. It seems clear that Plan 9's core model has got a
helluvalot more to offer than rio + acme + kencc and friends... but if Glenda
doesn't get the chance to produce further offspring, that theory will never be
fully realized.

So as to not merely "complain", I'll venture some obvious ideas:

Perhaps a new mailing list - to act as a lightening rod for "non-canon" Plan 9
ideas, discussion and projects.

Perhaps a linguistic convention to help mitigate the dichotomy (and perpetual
conflict) that occurs between two camps of thought regarding the official
standard Plan 9 distribution. The conflict seems to arise due to differring
ideas of just what 'Plan 9' is... there appears to be an unnecessary friction
between keeping Plan 9 mostly as it _is_, and making Plan 9 something
_different_ than it currently is.

In other words, there's a battle between "Plan 9 same" and "Plan 9 different"
- as though There Can Only Be One. But if "Plan 9 different" was called, say,
Plan X instead of Plan 9... then perhaps the "Plan 9 same" folks wouldn't feel
that Plan 9 proper was in constant jeopardy of becoming polluted/diluted.

The Plan 9ers have "successfully" prevented the Plan Xers from "encroaching",
but it's the Plan Xers who are going to find new and interesting expressions
of a Plan 9 based operating system, however in order to bootstrap, the Plan
Xers need the experience and insights of the Plan 9ers... yet there's an
antagonistic conundrum that prevents the two perspectives from peering.

Is any of this even worth discussing? Or is this just another example of
"talk, talk, talk" from yet another troll who has no intention of actually
doing something productive?


Kind regards