> I have no reason to believe Bell Labs' not-so-current > experimentation is any more "saintly" and free of blemish than the > previous. In time somebody will come up with the Plan 9 Haters Handbook.
Surely, there has been enough traffic here to emphasise that Plan 9 contains some good, fresh ideas in many cases to address Unix's original failures of vision? The "perfect" operating system isn't even a pipe dream, specially when hardware converges to a lowest-common-denominator variety of CPU design with legacy going back generations and the common consensus is to inflate the kernel with as many features as it can possibly contain, irrespective of their actual merit, nevermind their mutual incompatibilities. Plan 9 is not "saintly" and I fail to see how you could have arrived at the perception that anyone here considers it so. Our own frustration (mine, at any rate) is that none of the more popular alternatives to Plan 9 has geared itself up to discard, as Plan 9 has, the baggage that makes Unix an inferior operating system and worse, that by refusing to see the need to do so the Unix-perpetuating community is condemning users to suffer unnecessarily. In this respect Plan 9 shows some of the way, it is annoying that it goes largely unacknowledged, specially as this becomes an obstacle to any further research in that direction. Information Technology has always been very complex and consequently prone to failures; sometimes spectacular failures, more often at the level of mere inconveniences. At the same time, computing power has increased phenomenally, making it possible for information technologists to aspire to grandiose products. The nett effect is an impossibly huge quantity of "software" of very dubious quality, partially moderated by the audience that uses it, an audience that is hardly competent to judge its quality and, worse, is conditioned to accept mediocre products because it is not aware of any alternatives. For that matter, there may be no alternatives, but that is a self-perpetuating situation. Ii is no more than a delusion that the audience will supply the quality, a delusion originating from the sheer magnitude of the audience. The result: Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and all the other offerings in diminishing popularity. Plan 9, initially, bucked this trend, aiming for simplicity and accuracy rather than quantity. Sadly, that's not a great survival trait _in_the_current_context_. Reminds me of the Great Reptiles. They ruled the world until conditions demanded different properties (furry skin? small size? warm blood? viviparous? whatever) and then they perished. My hope is that Plan 9 is more like a small furry mammal than something destined for estinction. But that is because I have considerable investment, technical and emotional, in it, not because it is a holy grail. I approve of its "new" properties and, being somewhat more discriminating than Mother Nature (or Natural Selection), I believe they are improvements in an abstract, not just, maybe not even, in a pragmatic, survival-oriented fashion. Maybe I'm looking at esthetics when the rest of the world is looking for performance. In my philosophy, civilisation is the ability to transcend the practical and seek something more satisfying; mathematics is more beneficial than physics, Plan 9 is more beautiful than Linux. But not saintly, not perfect, not the product of infallible wisdom. Not even more useful, any more than, say, Michelangelo's David is useful. Plan 9 is the product of artistry, the best I have been exposed to, which is not to say that there aren't sculptures out there that may be deemed greater than Michelangelo's. But, in a subjective fashion, Plan 9 is better than the obvious contenders, where it is clear that the developers have followed totally different "esthetic" principles and, sadly, have overlooked certain fundamentals that are in my opinion totally non-negotiable simply because they have been revealed and shown to be valuable. You want something else, you're extremely lucky to exist in a world with many choices. Make the most of them. ++L
