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Plan 9 isn’t UNIX hating. It’s a successor to UNIX. Many of the things we take for granted in UNIX and UNIX-like systems are actually kludge written to address
by pushpop 7y ago
Plan 9 isn’t UNIX hating. It’s a successor to UNIX. Many of the things we take for granted in UNIX and UNIX-like systems are actually kludge written to address a short coming of UNIX. Plan 9 was invented to take lessons learned from that and build on UNIX from a ground up reimagining. Thus it is going to differ in some ways while feeling very similar in others.
I think it’s fair to say that Plan 9 is a bit less exciting these days because some of the really great ideas from Plan 9 has seeped its way into Linux and UNIX. But there is also some degree of “momentum lock-in” going on too where UNIX is what people are familiar with so it’s what people expect. Though it’s probably more accurate to say “GNU” these days rather than UNIX (if the conversations about people loading GNU coreutils on Macs via homebrew are anything to be believed)
- jacquesm 7y agoPlan 9 is more UNIX than UNIX itself. It did away with all the special cases and the result is a beautiful way to create systems components. There are only two operating systems that I've worked with that I actually really enjoyed, the one is QnX and the other is Plan 9, everything else feels like a series of kludges.
- pushpop 7y agoI can sympathise with that. UNIX does get a lot right and if you’re just scratching the surface of things it feels a very powerful system. There is a lot to like there but the more I delved deeper in my career the more ugliness I’d run into. The thing with UNIX is it’s “good enough” in most areas that people don’t always notice those pain points and it’s ingrained enough that the alternatives often feel “worse” just by virtue of being different.