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

[lucio@proxima.alt.za]

> ... are simply - by far - much more important and practical to a greater
> number of people than these other prominent Plan 9  idioms:
>
> * radical frugal simplicity throughout the entire system

This would remove itself as soon as the developer base increases
beyond an indeterminate critical mass.  That's precisely how Linux
grew beyond Minix.  But there is Linux already out there, so no
clarion call to developers to move to a less popular platform.  Plan 9
and NetBSD have many philosophical issues in common and both suffer
(benefit?) from a shrinking user base because populism (fashion)
rules.  Polluting Plan 9 with fashionable toys isn't going to save the
world, isn't even going to be useful to the existing Plan 9 community,
so why do you believe it should happen, rather than allow Plan 9 as it
exists, both as a philosophy and as the implementation of this
philosophy, to demonstrate that a simpler lifestyle is also
sufficient?

What do you see in a "liberated" Plan 9 that would make it superior to
the existing tools out there?  Or, to ask the same question in a
different form, why do you pick on Plan 9 to become your target
platform through unwelcome (*) transformations instead of transforming
that which is already much closer to your objectives?

(*)	"unwelcome" both because some of us believe it to be ethically
	undesirable and because the more pragmatic ones amongst us have
	not found sufficient motive to focus on them.  Take fgb, for
	example, who found cause to port curses to Plan 9, opening the
	door to many new developments: few have done much with this, what
	changes would you effect that would increase these contributions
	significantly?

> * a stance against POSIX and other standards

The stance is against polluting Plan 9 with inconsistent,
committee-defined functionalities that often contradict even common
sense.  Posix is yet another cesspool where nothing is ever removed,
no matter how foul.

> * a stance against alternate programming language paradigms

Not at all, only against extending C in a direction that has been
shown to be counter-productive.  Alef was dropped out of necessity,
Python and Perl are available, Go has been considered, Tcl was ported
moderately easily, it is only the G++ model of C++ that has been
proved intractable.  Sadly, that is what everyone is clamouring for,
so it looks like a much bigger issue than is truly the case.  The
problem here is again not of Plan 9's making, it is that the mass of
developers have no understanding of portability and therefore paint
themselves into the Linux corner.  Again, how do you propose to alter
Plan 9 to address this form of antisocial behaviour?

> * a strong bias towards a particular form of user interaction with the
> system (i.e. acme, rio, etc)

There are already two camps in Plan 9, one that uses acme, the other
uses sam and many experiences cannot be shared because of that.  Are
you sure you'd improve on this by releasing hundreds of customised
window managers for people to share even less?  How would adding emacs
as an editor improve matters, as an example?

Now, imagine that in your Plan X context somebody actually ported
Firefox: what kind of gymnastics would it take to feed the port
upstream and make sure that the next release does not destroy all the
efforts?  And what are the chances that the various extensions to
Firefox would also be ported and maintained?  Where are you going to
find the good will and resources to maintain just one of this class of
projects, nevermind the tens of thousands out there (of which GCC/G++
is one, by the way, why is it so hard to port it to Plan 9, if it is
such a portable piece of engineering?).  And, most crucially, why
would anyone offer to do that when it's already available?

Linux filled a gap by being free at the time when there was a great
demand for inexpensive and unencumbered software to match the
ridiculously low price of computer hardware.  No analogous demand
exists today that would be satisfied by the Plan X you envisage, or,
more humbly, perhaps you can show me what such a demand is.

But if the demand is, as is my case, for a simpler, easier to
maintain, easier to understand computing platform, then Plan 9 and not
your Plan X, is the answer.

++L