7 ms·

It's mind boggling that there are still some people who don't think Plan 9 was a text book case of second system syndrome.

coldtea 4y ago
It's mind boggling that someone will consider it a case of second system syndrome. Second system syndrome is not about "trying to make improvements to a first version of something and failing in the market". It's about trying to make improvements and ending up with a convoluted mess. The Wiki definition is literally: "The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.". That's nothing like Plan-9, whose developers insisted on a simple elegant small design, with the original ethos of Unix, kept it KISS at all times, and if anything made it even simpler and more coherent than the original (which is why Linux copied all the major Plan-9 features over the years). Failing in the market is orthogonal to this being (or, in this case, not being) a "second system syndrome". The reason for that was that it was a proprietary platform, the existing unices were "good enough" for it to gain traction, and it came at a time that companies turned first Windows NT and soon after Linux. Besides ALL traditional UNIX vendors failed and most folded at the same period.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  It is second system syndrome, and it absolutely is about the market. No wonder so many academic types fall to second-system syndrome, they don't think about their users only themselves. Second system syndrome is absolutely related to market success when you're talking about a commercial system like this -- how else are you going to gauge success? Transparent distributed single system, for example. The strange and unexplainable obsession by so many computer systems developers. The reality is almost nobody wants it, yet Plan9 was almost entirely designed around this concept. A complete boondoggle. Even the nerdy people who get a kick out of this kind of thing will set up a single system distributed cluster and run a few commands and say "hey that's neat" and then go back to using Windows or Linux, complete with tools for remote administration of systems, and applications that can do clustering and distributed systems in the cases where it's necessary or helpful.
  - carbotaniuman 4y ago
    If Plan 9 had been released earlier before Unix took over the world, then there's a good chance Plan 9 would've taken over the world instead. Bad decisions can be made without the second system effect coming into play, and vice versa. Releasing plan 9 as a propietary OS during that time was pure folly, but not the second system effect. And the second system effect needs not be about the market at all? I wrote a distributed caching thing once that was somewhat of a hack in many places and the replacement for it has been stuck in development hell for over a year now. No market to speak off.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      > If Plan 9 had been released earlier before Unix took over the world, then there's a good chance Plan 9 would've taken over the world instead. If something different had happened things might have been different. Maybe. There's also a good chance it wouldn't have, in my opinion, and Unix still would have taken over the world. > Bad decisions can be made without the second system effect coming into play, and vice versa. Yes but Plan 9 is a classic second system syndrome. Unix made "everything is a file, but not quite". Plan 9 took that to the absolute extreme, demonstrating that they clearly missed what was good about that Unix design choice, which was was not some theoretical purity. Unix was a highly network-able system, and Plan 9 took that to the absolute extreme trying to develop a distributed single system image, again missing what was good about Unix networking, which was not the ability to make a remote machine behave as though it was the same system as the local one. > Releasing plan 9 as a propietary OS during that time was pure folly, but not the second system effect. No you're right, the proprietaryness of the OS wasn't the part that was the second system syndrome. Over-engineering something that was not needed or wanted and releasing it 8-10 years after many successful commercial and academic Unixes had been used. I mean if it was a research effort to inform how Unix might evolve and be improved in the real world sure, but they expected actual users to switch over to this warmed over Unix-ish looking thing with lots of things you don't want, oh and it's incompatible with your existing systems. Come on. I know this hurts Plan 9 fanatics to hear, but it's not amazing. You can listen on a network port with a file, and you can access a file or run a program on some other computer "in the ether". Neat. Then you go on with your life.

coldtea 4y ago

It's mind boggling that someone will consider it a case of second system syndrome. Second system syndrome is not about "trying to make improvements to a first version of something and failing in the market". It's about trying to make improvements and ending up with a convoluted mess. The Wiki definition is literally: "The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.". That's nothing like Plan-9, whose developers insisted on a simple elegant small design, with the original ethos of Unix, kept it KISS at all times, and if anything made it even simpler and more coherent than the original (which is why Linux copied all the major Plan-9 features over the years). Failing in the market is orthogonal to this being (or, in this case, not being) a "second system syndrome". The reason for that was that it was a proprietary platform, the existing unices were "good enough" for it to gain traction, and it came at a time that companies turned first Windows NT and soon after Linux. Besides ALL traditional UNIX vendors failed and most folded at the same period.

throwawaylinux 4y ago
It is second system syndrome, and it absolutely is about the market. No wonder so many academic types fall to second-system syndrome, they don't think about their users only themselves. Second system syndrome is absolutely related to market success when you're talking about a commercial system like this -- how else are you going to gauge success? Transparent distributed single system, for example. The strange and unexplainable obsession by so many computer systems developers. The reality is almost nobody wants it, yet Plan9 was almost entirely designed around this concept. A complete boondoggle. Even the nerdy people who get a kick out of this kind of thing will set up a single system distributed cluster and run a few commands and say "hey that's neat" and then go back to using Windows or Linux, complete with tools for remote administration of systems, and applications that can do clustering and distributed systems in the cases where it's necessary or helpful.
- carbotaniuman 4y ago
  If Plan 9 had been released earlier before Unix took over the world, then there's a good chance Plan 9 would've taken over the world instead. Bad decisions can be made without the second system effect coming into play, and vice versa. Releasing plan 9 as a propietary OS during that time was pure folly, but not the second system effect. And the second system effect needs not be about the market at all? I wrote a distributed caching thing once that was somewhat of a hack in many places and the replacement for it has been stuck in development hell for over a year now. No market to speak off.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    > If Plan 9 had been released earlier before Unix took over the world, then there's a good chance Plan 9 would've taken over the world instead. If something different had happened things might have been different. Maybe. There's also a good chance it wouldn't have, in my opinion, and Unix still would have taken over the world. > Bad decisions can be made without the second system effect coming into play, and vice versa. Yes but Plan 9 is a classic second system syndrome. Unix made "everything is a file, but not quite". Plan 9 took that to the absolute extreme, demonstrating that they clearly missed what was good about that Unix design choice, which was was not some theoretical purity. Unix was a highly network-able system, and Plan 9 took that to the absolute extreme trying to develop a distributed single system image, again missing what was good about Unix networking, which was not the ability to make a remote machine behave as though it was the same system as the local one. > Releasing plan 9 as a propietary OS during that time was pure folly, but not the second system effect. No you're right, the proprietaryness of the OS wasn't the part that was the second system syndrome. Over-engineering something that was not needed or wanted and releasing it 8-10 years after many successful commercial and academic Unixes had been used. I mean if it was a research effort to inform how Unix might evolve and be improved in the real world sure, but they expected actual users to switch over to this warmed over Unix-ish looking thing with lots of things you don't want, oh and it's incompatible with your existing systems. Come on. I know this hurts Plan 9 fanatics to hear, but it's not amazing. You can listen on a network port with a file, and you can access a file or run a program on some other computer "in the ether". Neat. Then you go on with your life.