Possibly the biggest motivation for porting Plan 9 was that it provides a very light-weight yet featureful kernel. Linux is way too big, but the compute node ke

Possibly the biggest motivation for porting Plan 9 was that it provides a very light-weight yet featureful kernel. Linux is way too big, but the compute node kernels IBM and Cray have been coming up with may be too simple. Plan 9 provides a rich environment but doesn't demand much of the environment. And yes, Fortran 77 can be quite efficient... but on the other hand, we're also seeing a lot of new software being written in Python, which (at least according to our process traces) tries to open thousands of non-existent files on startup. So efficiency isn't everything they care about... it's partly that they were used to Fortran, and now they're used to Python, and something scarily new like Plan 9 is, well, scary. Oh, and good luck trying to convince people that MPI isn't necessarily the only solution for parallel programming. If the community at large has its way, we'll still be using Linux and MPI in 2040.