From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <6cc27558710263342edab21d0db7e92a@lsub.org> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] new compilers From: "Fco. J. Ballesteros" Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 11:17:06 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 29d4579e-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 We just came back from percom, where we gave a couple of talks about Plan B and Omero. Perhaps surprisingly, the main problem for people to understand what we did was not a particular point in Plan B, but the main Plan 9 idea. When you say "everything is a file", they get scared. When you convince them that those "files" are not files on disk, and that you exchange data using the fs interface, then their main argument is: It's so simple that this probably does not work. Simplicity seems to be hard to grasp. And also, most people IMHO really forgot unix and what interfaces are about. Type checking was also a concern. I think they did not understand that a data type (or xml tree) is not a guarantee to have the system know about "semantics". They got even more scared when I replied that the system should best not be involved in semantics (which is up to the user). So, sic.