On Sun, 12/31/17, Bakul Shah <ba...@bitblocks.com> wrote: > I don't think we can assume a more popular plan9 would have > met the fate of Linux. What bothers (some of) us is not that > Linux is mainstream but that it is far too complicated and > kitchensinky.
I'd like to think that there can be widespread use without the bloat and absurdities. However, I suspect that overly complicated and kitchensinky is necessary for mainstream. From what I've observed over the last 40 years, even among those who are technically educated, the subset who will choose well-designed over packed-with-unused-features is sadly small. Seeing how many "modern" programmers immediately reach for the obscene JavaScript "frameworks" for everything they do is enough to drive one to drink. I will admit that the cause and effect might also work in the other direction. There does seem to be a very real case to be made that as a system becomes more popular, it attracts more people who lack the judgement and the good taste to say 'no' to features that don't fit well. Personally, I think that popularity and bloat form a positive feedback loop that stalls out once the complexity budget is exhausted. From then on, all future releases merely rearrange the bugs. Certainly, I'd love to be proved wrong. But I can't think of any examples where the mainstream user and developer communities were able to resist the latest "ooh shiny." Just look how long it's taken for the community to realize that flash was a bad idea. BLS
