Re: [9fans] the practicality of plan 9

[sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9fans@sirjofri.de>]

Hello,

just wanted to add that (independent of grids) what's especially great on Plan 9 is the general concept of "resource abstraction".

Let's first consider what "resource" means in this context, since it can be anything: computing resources might be the obvious, but user files are also resources, as well as practical abstracted resources from more complex systems and processes. Basically anything can be a resource.

On Plan 9, all of these resources can be abstracted as a filesystem, which is the common abstraction for all things. Those filesystems are of course network ready and there's no type of "special" filesystem unlike on many other operating systems (for example, on linux you have some special filesystem that manages disk space and that embeds into the OS. On Plan 9 it doesn't matter what's under the hood, as long as it talks 9p it's fine).

And since you have fully dynamic namespaces per process basically you can control which exact services (as a filesystem) you want to use for your specific purpose. You want to use a different network card for your process? Just import the filesystem. You want to access another microscope, telescope or camera for your image processing software? Just import that filesystem. That's not a camera but stored images you captured earlier? Who cares. As long as your software doesn't care, just use it.

This also works great with interfaces to hardware or software resources. As long as the interface looks the same you can easily exchange a filesystem with another. Just build your namespace and do what you want.

And since Plan 9 is fully network ready nobody cares about if the filesystem is actually stored on the same machine, a remote machine on the same network, at the other end of the world, or just a small arduino that talks 9p over some weird infrared signal line some teenager constructed in their basement. It just doesn't matter, the system doesn't care.

In my opinion that's where Plan 9 really shines and empowers me to do crazy stuff. Of course it's more ideological and philosophical, but it's a great perspective to have. And it's more fun to work with it that way.

This is also why I think Plan 9 is very modern. There are many new ideas nowadays that you can find within Plan 9 already in a much more elegant way. Take alone the plumber, which is an incredible utility. It's simple and you can find more "modern" (i.e. complex) solutions on android/ios, windows 10+, mac and modern linux environments, but plumber is just more simple and powerful. And that's just one example, pretty sure you cam find other examples yourself.

Well, again I just want to add a small little detail that's great but I write a long passage. Sorry for the long message.

sirjofri

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