From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Theo Honohan MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Laura's theme (Long) (Was: [9fans] I've got 4 student intern (undergraduates) here.) In-Reply-To: <20010611081451.A8737@cackle.proxima.alt.za> References: <20010611051419.25CC4199C0@mail.cse.psu.edu> <20010611081451.A8737@cackle.proxima.alt.za> Message-Id: Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 15:28:07 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: b44c58e8-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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