From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Richard Miller MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: Subject: [9fans] in praise of simplicity Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 10:10:06 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 63c43b34-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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 Were they duplicates of the same message? Finding out took another couple of seconds: messageid 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