Re: [9fans] Laura's theme (Long) (Was: [9fans] I've got 4 student intern (undergraduates) here.)

[Theo Honohan <theo@ideaworks3d.com>]

On Monday 11 June, Lucio De Re wrote ("Laura's theme (Long) (Was: [9fans] I've got 4 student intern (undergraduates) here.)"):
> 
> Without excluding myself from the criticism, the Plan 9 culture is
> inherently elitist, rather than evangelical.  I'm about to embark on a
> cross-host debugging session (Inferno, rather than Plan 9, I'm not
> sure how successful I'm likely to be) and only when confronted by this
> need, did I realise that Laura's question about impressing students
> should have been answered by a cross-host task, the more convoluted,
> the better.  No one else has proposed such an idea, and yet the main
> strength of the fileserver approach lies clearly in that quarter.

Absolutely!  Well said.  I spent several futile hours at the weekend
trying to articulate exactly that point.

If the students have encountered the pseudo-network-transparency of X11
or NFS, they'll immediately appreciate the advantages of the Plan 9
approach.  It's all about just presenting the three main design
principles listed in the overview paper.  Then, you show that the Plan 9
approach solves all of the same problems as X, ssh X-forwarding, NFS and
VNC, in a much cleaner way.  That should appeal to any CS student.  Then
you show how it goes way beyond that, allowing fine-grained cross-host
sharing of resources.  Russ's anecdote about Windows and ssh is a good
example: 
http://lists.cse.psu.edu/archives/9fans/2000-October/007937.html

Not everyone will immediately recognize the need for that kind of
contortion, but people who have developed software across multiple
machines, or have run their own small network of Linux boxes, will be
sent into transports of delight.

I'm less convinced that Acme is a good selling point; people are
unlikely to see a new editor or IDE and think "Oh, I want to change
editors!"  Habits are hard to break, and editors are a matter of
personal taste (as are mouse chords...)

Theo