Re: [9fans] Re: [inferno-list] Shoot

[Jack Johnson <knapjack@gmail.com>]

I don't mean to start a flame war, but...

On 5/22/05, Uriel <uriell@binarydream.org> wrote:
> That also discounts the millions of lines of crud those 130k sit on top
> of, a few times more code than the whole Plan 9 and Inferno systems put
> together.

I don't mean to discount that at all, either.  In fact, it was to put
in the same context as the point you made earlier in the conversation:

>On 5/22/05, Uriel <uriell@binarydream.org> wrote:
>> Nah, we got this 6 million lines of crud implementing a mountain of
>> braindamaged 'standards', tons upon tons of inconsistent ad-hoc hacks
>> everyone implements differently... all to get what would take a handful
>> of lines of code to write in rc or Limbo.

Meaning that no matter what system a clean, sane solution rides on top
of, it still comes with baggage.  And I still ask, what does the end
result look like?  I'm doubtful we'll change the installed base of the
rest of the planet, so do we ask everyone to run an Inferno
application to get the same functionality that their browser already
provides?  Most users could care less about those 6 million lines of
code unless it takes more than twenty minutes to download or breaks
and can't be fixed.

Now, sure, maybe it's already broken.  I buy that.  But now your
grandmother or your third grader is going to use its replacement. 
What makes that repacement qualitatively better?

> and then you would end up with a lousy result, because the web is too
> inconsistent.

It was designed for inconsistency.  It's the act of trying to make it
consistent that breaks the design.

> You mean it's like... using a text editor on your local file system? Now
> that is what I call progress!

It's more than text.  It's interacting with the result.

Many of us use editors outside the Plan 9 and Inferno realm that let
us collapse sections of code to give us another view of the same
information.  Sometimes those kinds of interaction prompt us to
consider a new model (or an old one).

After all, that extra window in sam is awfully handy, and vi *is* just
and editor.

> How does the wc(1) of the web look like? Yet another plug-in with yet
> another context menu?

It depends.  What the hell are you doing using wc(1) on the Web?  Now
grep, maybe....

> "Please note that this site works best in Firefox[1]. It will also work
> almost as well in Internet Explorer[6]. It will not work properly in
> Opera or Safari" You call this portable? Firefox is >6 million lines of
> C++ that will run on windows and X/POSIX.

...which is an astounding feat for >6 million lines of anything.  And
could hardly be said of our own tools before the advent of plan9ports.

> Plumbing and 9P solve 70% of the problem, all you need is a syntax for
> global namespace identifiers(URL replacement) and and a protocol to
> access the resources, perfect task for 9P.

What about rich expression of and interaction with the content (beyond
programming)?  Getting data from point A to point B is old hat. 
That's not how we get to 6 million lines of code.

> In the end, as Unix and Plan 9 have demonstrated again and again,
> textual interfaces are the key, with a clean and uniform representation
> where simple tools can work on any inputs and their output can easily
> become the input of the next tool.

For most users on the planet, they don't look at the content as
resource for another tool, but as the end product.  It's about their
relationship to the content that drives their actions.

The separation of user and programmer is one of the reasons we have
these circular debates, and one of the reasons even our best advocates
turn to other platforms for at least part of their daily work.  And
yes, I mean work.

> Or you could use sane plain text formats and awk... or s-exprs and
> scheme, or...

See, now s-expressions and scheme, there's a great, implementable
idea, full of expressive possibility for the end-user.  Exactly the
kind of thing I was seeking, without dragging us both into a diatribe.

-Jack