From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:12:53 +0100 From: Eris Discordia To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Subject: Re: [9fans] sad commentary Topicbox-Message-UUID: cf4f4754-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Hi 9fans, I'm writing this in an "open letter" style because I find eric's original post and the follow-up quite "on-topic" with respect to my unsuccessful Plan 9 experience. To provide context, let me describe myself as a "serious hobbyist," which means I know my way around Windows and at least 2 other (UNIX-like) OS's--I can set up a reasonably secure sendmail and BIND installation, write a little Perl or C program to do my bidding, and wouldn't gawk at you if you talked about using xmllint to check a document's well-formedness but I'm not a kernel "hacker" or a "hacker" of any sort for that matter. I can Get My Personal Job Done (tm) but you wouldn't hire me as an admin. When I downloaded the Plan 9 4e ISO image I thought to myself "one more OS adventure." It turned out to be a very frustrating one. Plan 9 wouldn't work fine, or work at all, on a number of freeware virtualization platforms which I am "sure" weren't especially rigged to run the other OS's they happened to run fine. It eventually worked on QEMU. Since I'm a "serious" hobbyist "bad" installation experience is hardly a deterrent to me--not anymore. When I came to actually "use" Plan 9 I found out the two interfaces I'd heard about, i.e. rc and rio, are both awkward despite how everybody on 9fans thought they were such glorious climaxes of simplicity and usability and how everybody would bash Bash. If I were to save one interface (textual or graphical) out of all interfaces that exist today that'd be Bash. Perhaps I'm a brainwashed FSF zombie in thinking so but I am once again "sure" rc or rio won't even be on my top ten list and that's no FSF zombie attitude. Some 9fans members may remember my original zeal to participate in 9fans and learn about Plan 9. That zeal was subdued when I went through the first few chapters of Francisco Ballesteros' fine book. Since then I've only been quietly reading 9fans posts and "not" using Plan 9. I believe this reasoning from Eris Raymond's "The Art of UNIX Programming" (a book that is more than a little on the snob side, by the way) is mutatis mutandis appropriate: "The long view of history may tell a different story, but in 2003 it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." --20.2 Plan 9: The Way the Future Was Let me say that Plan 9 didn't seem to me, as a user and not a "hacker," to even cover any meaningful "rust spots," for example, of FreeBSD. Rio is actually a failure despite whatever the 9fans people and Rob Pike may say. Fossil/Venti, however brilliant it may look like to the code junkie, does not offer anything for me but added complexity. Plan 9 neither fulfills previous functions nor defines new ones for any "end user" or even "hobbyist," except perhaps the most sturdy of them. It is probably a wonderful research platform for computer science students but it cannot and will not support even the simpler tasks a student of, say, mathematics expects of their PC these days, e.g. symbolically solving an equation system (without going through implementing or porting a computer algebra system or learning some twisted Lisp, of course). Good software--to a mathematics student--like Maple will never become available on Plan 9, as it did on Linux, and for the third time I am "sure" this isn't because Maplesoft has any special affiliation with the Linux people. It's simply because Plan 9 is not the user's OS, it isn't even the geek's OS, or the nerd's OS, it is only the CS/CE OS Design student's OS, with a little margin kept to accommodate a few sturdy geeks and professionals interested in special applications. In fact, I suspect Bell/Lucent made Plan 9 publicly available because they found no better use for it. Plan 9 was not released to the public, instead "jettisoned" into the public's care. Of course, this "accusation" of mine remains as undocumented as any conspiracy theory but I'm inclined to believe it. No one should wonder why Plan 9 isn't remembered or used even in such geeky communities as Slashdot. It just isn't "our" kind of OS and by "us" I mean lowlifes like me in contrast to the "grand exalted" Plan 9 user. Best wishes, Eris Discordia P.S. Heck, this "is" some sad commentary.