I think ESR summarized it very well for the layman almost 20 years ago in "the art of unix programming": http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html ht

I think ESR summarized it very well for the layman almost 20 years ago in "the art of unix programming": http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html