From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 08:52:35 -0500 From: Russ Cox To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] acme design (long) In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 977e6c70-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 You're not arguing about Acme vs. Oberon. You're arguing about Plan 9 vs. Oberon. As Rob said a few days ago, no one sat down and said "let's build a system that's not like Unix", and similarly no one set out to build a "non-Oberon". Plan 9 and Oberon are both clean systems built around simple (but different) models of how computing resources should be presented. They each have their advantages and disadvantages. Once you accept that, it's easy to see that Acme is, as Rob said in the paper, inspired by the Oberon look and feel but adapted to the Plan 9 model instead of the Oberon one: Acme is a new program, a combined window system, editor, and shell, that applies some of the ideas distilled by Oberon. Where Oberon uses objects and modules within a programming language (also called Oberon), Acme uses files and commands within an existing operating system (Plan 9). There's not much point in answering any of the specifics of your "debate" emails. You're arguing about the relative merits of apples and oranges. Good luck. Russ