On Wed, Jun 07, 2006 at 06:39:42PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> Plan 9's "future" is in guiding the UNIX community forward, not in
> regressing back to what spawned it in the first place. And I
> sincerely hope that doesn't happen by having Plan 9 be adopted
> wholesale by the masses, for that would (sooner or later) see the end
> of research and innovation for the sake of not breaking all the
> currently running apps, which is what caused UNIX to start growing
> mold. I would much rather see Plan 9 stay small and mostly ignored,
> since that's how it will remain agile and pliable. It's the *ideas*
> from Plan 9 (e.g. the servers, namespaces) that will help the masses
> morph their current environment into something suitable for the 21st
> century.
I concur. One has to ask the question, *why* does one want to attract
new users to Plan 9? It would take many man-centuries of effort to get
an environment as rich (for the end-user) as that provided by the
mainstream Unices right now. And what would be the point? As many
have noted, it would lead to increased complexity, bloat, and decreased
quality on what is otherwise a pretty clean and high quality system.
Plan 9 would, at that point, cease to be Plan 9 and turn into something
else. I don't particularly want that, just as I don't really want to
add a lot of new ``features'' to C: if I want C++, Java, C#, or Ruby, I
know where to get them. Similarly, if I want Unix, I know where to get
it.
Instead, I'd like to go back to basics and use Plan 9 as a clean,
conceptually pure prototype for a new Unix-like system. Let's take the
good ideas from Plan 9, and a current BSD kernel (probably the FreeBSD
one), a current Unix user-land, an axe, and go to town like Charles did
with SunOS 4 back in the day. For that matter, throw in some of the
good ideas from VSTa (now FMI/OS? They seem to be regressing: from
their Wiki's page on `Current Work': ``working on getting switching to
posix style error numbers instead of strings. done'' Great...), EMAS,
TOPS-20, VMS, Multics, QNX, etc. (Yes! VMS had some good ideas! Like
a standardized calling convention that made it possible to call modules
from any number of languages! 20 years ago! Stick THAT in your ELF
and smoke it!) But in general, you know, look back at history and add
in some of those things that were good ideas and got lost in the sands
of time but which will get reinvented two years from now, badly,
because no one thinks to do any research before starting on their work
anymore. At least, not in computer science....
Of course, that will never happen, and Geoff is right: it's mostly an
issue with education and defeating incorrect or outdated perceptions (I
get physically ill when I hear about ``efficiency'' these days. Yeah,
like your GCC extension to pack struct's is *so* much more efficient on
a 3 GHz machine than code to pack it or unpack it from a bytestream.
You spend more time porting it to a new platform than you ever did
writing and debugging once, and running an arbitrary number of times,
the byte packing code). Too bad the example a beginning programmer
sees now is the cess pool of open source cruft instead of well-written
code.
- Dan C.
