Re: [9fans] nice quote

[Eris Discordia <eris.discordia@gmail.com>]

> Using your theories, please explain why Lisp and Plan 9 both hover around
> the same level of popularity (i.e., not very, but not dead either).

I don't think I can say anything in that respect that cannot either be 
easily refuted or greatly improved upon by someone already reading this 
list and just too busy with their own stuff to post. Some of them 
explicitly avoid feeding the troll (that I be, supposedly).

Anyway, here's what I think: Plan 9 and LISP are different, evolutionarily. 
LISP seems to me like a downsized reptile that has survived and been forced 
to exist in the shadow of mammals after the Mesozoic while Plan 9 looks 
more like a lemur. A rather recently developed mammal driven into a small 
area by its close kin from a common ancestor.

And one primary note: I have come to understand, in part thanks to this 
very list, that popularity isn't really a good measure of merit for 
computer stuff but you asked about popularity so I'll try to focus on that. 
(Case in point, there's a lot I read about on this list that I don't think 
I'd hear about in a lifetime, and this isn't a popular list.)

**********

LISP evolved in a parallel path to the line of languages that descended 
from ALGOL. It represented/represents a programming paradigm--whose 
significance is beyond me but visible to CS people--and it used to also 
embody an application area. That application area, at the time, overlapped 
with the ambitions of some of the best experts in computation. LISP gained 
momentum, became an academic staple, was the pride and joy of world's best 
CS/CE departments. The application area got hit but the programming 
paradigm was strong as before.

The paradigm has scientific value--which is again beyond me but I trust CS 
people on that--so it continues to be taught at world's best CS/CE 
departments and to up-and-coming programmers and future computer 
scientists. SICP is witness to that. In the academy, LISP will live on as 
long as the paradigm it's attached to lives on and is deemed significant. 
Those same people who are educated in some dialect of LISP, as well as 
other languages, found businesses and apply their knowledge; occasionally, 
by way of their training in LISP. For whatever reason they see merit in it 
that many self-educated programmers or those trained at lesser institutions 
don't. Obviously, there aren't that many top CS/CE departments and those 
with founder status or strongly influences by founder institutions are 
still fewer. Hence, LISP's living dead state: "popularity" among the elite. 
Mind you, the natural divide between the two groups can sometimes be a 
cause of resentment and get non-LISP people badmouthing it.

**********

Plan 9, on the other hand, was supposed to be a drop-in successor to 
UNIX--a natural step forward. It was supposed to satisfy long-time UNIX 
users by deceiving them with a similar-looking toolset while implementing a 
large change of philosophy whose impact would only become clear after 
(previous) UNIX users had already settled in. The factors that kept it from 
actually replacing UNIX everywhere are many.

One factor was timing. It reached various tiers of "ignorant masses" when 
not one but multiple possible continuations of UNIX, all of them FOSS, had 
already gained foothold (GNU/Linux and *BSD).

The other factor was its overly complex arrangement compared to the mundane 
purposes of lowly creatures more or less like me. I have tried arguing why 
Plan 9 as it is is a hassle on desktop systems and have been met with 
criticism that mostly targeted my lack of computer aptitude in general 
rather than my argument. I stressed what I termed "conceptual complexity" 
of Plan 9's model of how things should be and the lack of _any_ user 
friendly, albeit sane, abstraction on top of that complexity.

A third, more important, factor is that it was advocated to people who 
probably couldn't understand how Plan 9 would serve them better than things 
they heard of more regularly, where was this new thing's edge that 
justified the cost of its adoption. I for one am still at a loss on that 
matter. As a hobbyist, I lurk, and occasionally--they say--troll, around 
here but I'm not keeping my huge media collection on a Plan 9 installation 
or using Acme for entering multi-lingual (up to three languages until a 
while ago, four recently) text. Either task would be extremely cumbersome 
to do on Plan 9 (and this really has little to do with the OS itself). In 
short, I won't be doing Plan 9 because it's Plan 9. I, and most of the 
lowly ones, need further justification that either hasn't been presented or 
is way above my, or our, head.

The fourth factor I can think of is Plan 9's owners' attitude towards it. I 
once dared go as far as saying it was actually "jettisoned." For reasons 
that are beyond me Plan 9 isn't seeing much attention from Bell Labs or its 
creators. It currently seems to lack the Benevolent Dictator for Life 
figure many FOSS projects have. The overall air around it is one of 
dereliction even if it is in fact being actively worked on behind the 
scenes. Whether this is desired is again beyond me.

As a final note I think I should draw your attention to Linux's and *BSD's 
path of ascendancy. All of these OSs seem to have consecutively attracted 
distinct groups of users: serious programmers/contributors/researchers, 
startups, the pleb (that's my kind), and corporate users--in that specific 
order. Plan 9 seems to have stopped at stage 2 (startups), or maybe it's 
just progressing and I am unaware of the progress. Regardless, attracting 
the pleb seems to be the key to entering corporate user market and 
widespread popularity, i.e. the stage where corporations, hoping to win the 
pleb or higher pleb (industries and businesses), are willing to sponsor 
(read: bribe) universities, students, and their own R&D departments in 
teaching, learning, and furthering the new thing's cause.

**********

I must stress again these are all my impressions; hallucinations, if you 
will.




--On Saturday, September 05, 2009 13:30 -0600 Daniel Lyons 
<fusion@storytotell.org> wrote:

> Eris,
>
> Using your theories, please explain why Lisp and Plan 9 both hover around
> the same level of popularity (i.e., not very, but not dead either).
>
> —
> Daniel Lyons
>
>