From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3e1162e60611141010x257ab08encccda28e14f8df2@mail.gmail.com> Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:10:35 -0800 From: "David Leimbach" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: Re: [9fans] Samterm up down key patch In-Reply-To: <13426df10611140544i5d4d2928nea0d64cd955a3b38@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <13426df10611140525k68c31de1s525c816957352836@mail.gmail.com> <13426df10611140544i5d4d2928nea0d64cd955a3b38@mail.gmail.com> Topicbox-Message-UUID: df9c39fc-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 11/14/06, ron minnich wrote: > On 11/14/06, erik quanstrom wrote: > > > who said we have to be like the rest of the world. i thought the > > point of plan 9 was to be different. the rest of the world uses sockets > > and nfs, too. ;-) > > ;-) taken :-) > > we have to be, not just different, but better. Some aspects of Plan 9 > strike me as different for difference's sake. I don't see a point to > it. I didn't immediately either. However I've been organizing my data in hierarchies thanks to the Unix filesystem for a long long time now, people are starting to realize that searching for data based on metadata and getting fuzzy results is sometimes better when you have 92 Terrabytes of data in your iMac. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but you get my point I'd hope. I think a lot of the way editors were written in the 80s was due to the fact that people probably didn't really "get" the mouse the way I think it was intended to be uhm... gotten. If you look back at the englebart demos, I see a lot of things that make me think more of Acme than emacs or vi. I also kind of want a chording keyboard on my left now as a result. The necessary momentum to make people change their minds on some things can be really difficult to achieve, and sometimes the effort to learn something better does distract from the focus of getting work done. In effect better becomes the enemy of good enough (Voltaire?) So that's why people still use Fortran on giant MPI clusters :-). And why Lisp will never take over the world, and why Acme will always be subject to patches to make cursors move with arrow keys. I think it's just human nature.