From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 00:19:25 -0400 From: Russ Cox To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] alright, this should be interesting In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <35b09c83f408fc9fd7a2b0d019a96010@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp> <41753982.2090903@anvil.com> Topicbox-Message-UUID: f1532f9c-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 You're claiming that the "software quality" of the underlying kernel somehow plays a role in determining the "software quality" of the software written on top of it, presumably by providing an example for others to follow. I agree with the general point -- people exposed to examples of clean software are more likely to write clean software -- but I think you've gone overboard. Specifically, I don't see why the kernel should be placed in such a position of importance. I think the effect is true of any software. I hung around Bell Labs for at least a year before I started using Plan 9, but the programs that I wrote during that time got a lot cleaner because I was exposed to good clean code, but it wasn't the kernels. I was using Linux at home and SGI Irix at Bell Labs. Also, your particular example is definitely flawed: Kernels are also important in the sense that they set the tone for everything above them: kencc wouldn't have happened on linux, for example. The cleanliness of Plan 9's kernel and the cleanliness of the C compilers are definitely correlated, but not directly. They're clean because Ken was intimately involved in both. If Ken had been using some other system, even Linux, and was writing a compiler, I'm confident he could have pulled off the same trick. In fact, my understanding is that the compilers happened in preparation for the kernel, so the kernel can't take credit. Russ