From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: akosela@andykosela.com (Andy Kosela) Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2017 15:05:43 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies? In-Reply-To: <20170326164030.GF20717@mcvoy.com> References: <20170326031122.E18D418C097@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <072F8CE1-5E54-46E5-BFAC-65952330B863@orthanc.ca> <20170326164030.GF20717@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On Sunday, March 26, 2017, Larry McVoy wrote: > On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 09:26:00AM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote: > > P.S. A fun example of the simplicity of the > > plan9 network API is this implementation of rlogin: > > http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/rsc/rlogin > > So while that is really neat, I personally think that's part of why Plan 9 > didn't take off. It's too clever, at least for me. I know the rlogin > code pretty well and if you showed me that code and asked me what it was, > without the comments, I don't think I would have put it together. On > the other hand, show me the C code and I'd be able to figure it out. > > It's perhaps because I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I really > like how blindingly obvious a lot of the original Unix code was. Not > saying > it was all that way, but a ton of it was sort of what you would imagine it > to be before you saw it. Which means I understood it and could bugfix it. > > A lot of original UNIX code was simple, but we ended up with 272 lines of bloat in echo.c[1]. That bloat started to creep in already in the beginning when Rob Pike formulated his famous presentation on cat(1)[2]. I also think that sockets implementation was the turning point. Plan 9 was probably the last truly dedicated effort to keep it simple using the UNIX way of doing things. I much prefer reading its code than GNU or FreeBSD. I think the world really needs a Unix operating system which is as simple and elegant as Plan 9. [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/echo.c [2] http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf --Andy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: