Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!)

[Jack Johnson <knapjack@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 8:29 PM,  <lucio@proxima.alt.za> wrote:
> very little new is being created, but rather many old things are being
> "improved" upon (regurgitated) in manners that consume more and more
> computing cycles and deliver less and less performance.

I think this is an important observation.

When I saw Rob's presentation on concurrency and message passing in
Newsqueak, the meat of the message that stuck in my brain was hey,
there are easier ways to do a lot of the stuff we're already doing.
When you look at the infrastructure to provide D-Bus vs what D-Bus
actually does, there is a huge opportunity cost to implement D-Bus if
that infrastructure does not already exist.  Conversely, if you wanted
to implement its features from scratch on, let's say, a non-UNIXlike
system with no GCC port, why on earth would anyone import the
infrastructure just for that service?

The shared infrastructure of the GCC-bound OSes do provide certain
heritage and growth benefits to those systems at certain costs.  I
think the Plan 9 community is one of the few development communities
that questions the costs of suggested growth.  It has always struck me
a more deliberate act of change rather than an adaptation to change,
and the pace that it provides also has its own costs and benefits.

Do I like EFL? Absolutely. Are there EFL concepts and techniques that
Plan 9 could benefit from? Probably. Do we need to import the
infrastructure to import EFL to benefit from that mindshare? Probably
not.

I'm naively hoping Go will eventually take us to some future middle
ground where folks can dabble in a shared sandbox of sanity from both
sides of the fence.

-Jack