[9fans] in praise of simplicity

[Richard Miller <miller@hamnavoe.demon.co.uk>]

Reading my mail in acme this morning, I encountered two messages which looked
very similar.  Were the contents identical?  Finding out took about three seconds:
	adiff /mail/fs/mbox/4[12]/body <ESC> <Middle-click>
Were they duplicates of the same message? Finding out took another couple of seconds:
	<Left-double-click on 'body'> messageid <Middle-select>

Other operating systems' mail-reading programs may have shiny 3D buttons and flocks
of elaborate features.  But how many, I wonder, have a menu button somewhere for
"compare message bodies?"  Plan 9 has only a bare-bones interface to the mailbox, but
it exposes the logical structure of the contents in a way which is consistent with
all the general-purpose tools provided by the system.

Would Plan 9 lose a "feature fight" with other operating systems?  I certainly hope so.
A proliferation of independent and inconsistent features does not add much utility.
Mostly it just makes a system harder to understand and harder to use.  Much more
important than feature count is compositionality -- the ability to combine primitive
tools in different ways to perform novel operations.  That's where Plan 9 wins.

Simplicity is power.

-- Richard Miller