On Monday, January 30, 2023, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:45 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:35:25AM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> > Plan 9 was different, and a lot of people who were familiar with Unix
> > didn't like that, and were not interested in trying out a different
> > way if it meant that they couldn't bring their existing mental models
> > and workflows into the new environment unchanged.
> >
> > At one point it struck me that Plan 9 didn't succeed as a widespread
> > replacement for Unix/Linux because it was bad or incapable, but
> > rather, because people wanted Linux, and not plan9.
>
> Many people make that mistake. New stuff instead of extend old stuff.
Some would argue that's not a mistake. How else do we innovate if
we're just incrementally polishing what's come before?
I would argue that Linux actually did a lot of things differently. It tried to conform to POSIX, but still there were a lof of fresh ideas that actually took off.
It was not possible in the free BSD world which inherited much more from the old Unix world.
> So now we have
> things like Rust that is pretty much completely different. Could we
> not have extended C to do what Rust does? Why do we need an entirely
> different syntax to say the same things?
People tried to extend C to do the things that Rust does and it didn't work.
Smells like C++ to me. Rust in essence is a re-implementation of C++ not C. It tries to pack as much features as it possibly can.
I don't know of any other language that throughout the years remained as pure and minimal as C. (maybe Forth).
> Seems like Plan 9 fell into that trap. When you invalidate all of the
> existing knowledge that people have, that creates a barrier to entry.
Plan 9, as a research system, was an experiment in doing things
differently. As a research system, it was remarkably influential: a
lot of the ideas made it into e.g. Linux. Imitation is the most
sincere form of flattery. As a production system, people just wanted
Linux. There was a time when people wanted to try out new ideas; oh
well.
Linux came out in the right place at the right time, right around the time when the Internet really became a cyberspace spanning the whole globe. Finland was first connected to the Internet in 1989. Linus bought his first 386DX33 in January 1991.
To me Linux represented a revolution in computing. It built on the shoulders of Unix forefathers but at the same time was a breath of fresh air in the Unix space. Young people at the time wanted that. That's why it became so wildly popular. It was a completely free, idealistic worldwide movement. It brought together a diverse group of people: university Unix programmers, home computer enthusiasts and demoscene hackers who just recently replaced their 8-bit C64's and Atari's with fresh 386-based PCs, young security hackers who watched too much War Games, etc. It was a very fresh movement at the time.
--Andy