From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: From: "Russ Cox" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: plan 9 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2002 10:44:31 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: e34804c0-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Ron's comment makes me think I should have explained myself a little more, and anyway I have a fun story. The whole fad OO argument saddens me, since Plan 9 probably pushes the real point of OO -- consistent and reused interfaces -- farther than any other system. The problem with the current fad OO world is that there are hardly any consistently-used interfaces, so you lose all the potential reuse. Plan 9 may only have one real interface but we sure do reuse it a LOT. And we really do have many interfaces, such as the one presented to a cpu server by a terminal (and by drawterm), or the one presented to clients by kernel graphics drivers (and by rio, and by vncs, and by drawterm), or the authentication files presented by the 3e kernels (and by authfs), or the auth files presented by auth/factotum (and by auth/factotum, whenever you care to reinvoke it!), and on and on. I would very much like to hear about any systems that are more object oriented. I got an iPod a few days ago, one of the spiffy new Windows ones that have a FAT32 file system. It came with MusicMatch Jukebox, which was exhibiting some bugs in the actual downloading to the iPod. There were various people who'd written software for Windows to talk to the Mac iPod (which has an HFS+ file system), software that was supposed to be quite good, and I mourned the fact that I couldn't use it. Then I remembered that all the Windows software for talking with the Mac iPod was layered on top of a general Mac file system driver, so that the iPod was actually mounted by Windows and manipulated via file system operations. Well, I reasoned, my iPod is already mounted, so I'll install the iPod software, ignore the Mac FS drivers, and point the software at my already-mounted FAT32 iPod. It worked the first time. Imagine if everything behaved like that, presenting good interfaces so that only the interface rather than the actual details of the implementation mattered. You'd have Plan 9. Russ