* [9fans] in praise of simplicity
@ 2001-02-14 10:10 Richard Miller
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From: Richard Miller @ 2001-02-14 10:10 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: 9fans
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
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2001-02-14 10:10 [9fans] in praise of simplicity Richard Miller
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