From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: <422c2c66f1d93f0928ca31b8c1e0c927@hamnavoe.com> Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 09:38:14 -0400 Message-ID: <509071940909050638k3f220f8co11547ec2ce39c158@mail.gmail.com> From: Anthony Sorace To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Subject: Re: [9fans] nice quote Topicbox-Message-UUID: 657159a6-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Akshat said: // Considering that Plan 9 has only two inherent languages... I'm curious which two you meant. Most of the code running on my Plan 9 installations is written in either C or rc. For code I've written running on it, Limbo is about as high. And of course there's a little assembly down deep. And a bunch of awk and mk, obviously. And acid is invaluable for the set of tasks for which it was designed. I also don't really know what "inherent" means. "Thing which generates machine code directly"? Or maybe "compiler/interpreter included in the distribution"? That's closest, I guess. // ...and its users often push for work to be done in only those... Simply disagree. Good Unix (and, here, by extension) Plan 9 folks tend to be fond of "little languages" - they coined the term, after all. I think in that sense, I'd be very surprised to find many Plan 9 folks argue against using the right tool (language) for the job. What I think you might be thinking of is that Plan 9 folks are a little more conservative in their selection of languages. You're not likely to see much perl here, because overall people aren't really convinced it offers anything over awk, maybe awk+rc. You're not likely to see much sh because we've got rc. Just because a tool exists doesn't mean it's the right tool for anything. This has its costs, mainly in application support. We might not like C++ because we don't see much advantage over C, and we might be right, but that doesn't change the fact that we've now got a higher barrier between us and application authors that made a different decision. That's often a good thing (less crap), but it does hurt us in places, too.