From Rob Pike quote at the end, after the Ryan Dahl quote: "... the UNIX/POSIX/Linux systems of today are messier, clumsier and more complex than the systems th

From Rob Pike quote at the end, after the Ryan Dahl quote: "... the UNIX/POSIX/Linux systems of today are messier, clumsier and more complex than the systems the original UNIX was designed to replace." "Messier, clumsier and more complex" are adjectives that could describe almost all of today's software vis a vis software from the 1970's. This is not a criticism of today's software it is just the evolution (or devolution) as it happened, an objective observation. By and large, programmers do not attempt to make software more clean, more efficient or less complex. Most do not spen all their time cleaning up messy code, fixing bugs, or sacraficing inefficiency at the expense of usability or abundance of "features". And almost none spend time removing code and reducing complexity. They do the opposite: add features, pursue "ease of use" at the expense of common sense and incessantly generate and commit code believing that any decline in commits or "software updates" signals a project is "dead", not "modern" and probably in need of a "replacement". Again, I'm not critiquing this, I am just stating the facts. This is what they do. Not sure about Pike, but the reason I think some older software is higher quality than most newer software is not because it was or is high quality in an objective sense. It's because today's software is so low in quality and in too many cases worse than yesterday's. Indeed, it's "messier, clumsier and more complex." In an objective sense, 1970's UNIX is nothing to celebrate. But compared to the then-alternatives, what came afterwards, and what we use today, it can be held in high regard. It's only good in a relative sense. Everything else was and still is so bad. (Why is anyone's guess.) Avoiding the hassles Dahl alludes to[1] brings me a certain feeling of satisfaction. My language of choice is Bourne shell. And if I am just working with text, such as reading and writing, I do not use a graphics layer - no X11. The question is: Does Pike's comment apply to Plan 9? 1. Not to mention avoiding the needless complexity and obscurity of Microsoft Windows.