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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 the

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
    >If something different had happened things might have been different. Maybe. You're absolutely right, this is too hazy and hand-wavy. Let's stick to what really matters: Plan 9 had no attributes of a "second system effect" as per the actual definition of the term. To paraphrase a famous quote: You keep using this term "second system effect". I don't think it means what you think it means.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      I notice you were unable address the parts of my comment where I showed it does fit the second system syndrome. That's what I suspected.
lproven 4y ago
> The reality is almost nobody wants it Hint: there is this thing called Kubernetes. It's quite successful now. It is a direct attempt to bodge onto Linux what Plan 9 did in the kernel. More examples... Microkernels: trying to turn a monolithic Unix kernel into a fleet of cooperating userspace servers, without using the filesystem as the comms mechanism as Plan 9 did. RPC: trying to bodge inter-node comms onto the standalone OS design of UNIX. The definition of the term "second system effect" is: « the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems » Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Plan 9 is dramatically smaller and simpler than mainstream UNIX systems, such as Linux. It is precisely and specifically the opposite of what you are claiming it to be.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Notice how all these things are being done in the real world on Linux, a monolithic Unix derivative. I mean some of the connections you're trying to draw there are pretty shaky too, but I didn't say Plan 9 has no good ideas and nothing was ever learned from it. If you want something concrete, the actual 9p protocol is used to share certain resources between virtual machines in Linux today. I think certain aspects of mount, e.g., bind and union mounts at least came to Linux via Plan9 too. That's not my argument. I'm not saying Plan9 is garbage with no redeeming features. But it is generally a failure, and a victim of second system syndrome. > the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems Over-engineered being the important part, although that phrase is pretty arbitrary. It's obsessing and becoming irrationally myopic on certain parts of the system that the designers liked or may have been unique or interesting in the first system, in the mistaken belief that those are the important parts of the system. > Plan 9 is dramatically smaller and simpler than mainstream UNIX systems, such as Linux. Well naturally, Plan 9 is a relic, and was never more than a toy even when it wasn't.
  - lproven 4y ago
    I think you profoundly misunderstand what is meant by the "second system effect" and this comment in no way addresses that issue. You're trying to redefine one term here but that does not defend your case. "Over-engineered" means "made more complex than it needs to be". More definitions: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/second-system-syndrome https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/second-system-syndro... https://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect https://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect The point of the second-system syndrome is that something is bigger and much more complex than its predecessor. Plan 9 is smaller, simpler, and cleaner than Unix, because whereas Unix was designed and built on and for standalone, text-based, terminal-driven minicomputers, Plan 9 was built for networked graphical workstations. The "graphical" part of that arguably is a liability, but the networked part is absolutely integral. All modern UNIX machines, to an approximation, are networked, and the Unix kernel at heart does not understand networking. This also applies to microkernel Unixes such as the HURD, Minix 3, and so on. The entire point of Plan 9 is that by considering the developing nature of Unix workstations and adapting the core Unix concepts to the concept of a network, by extending the kernel's core abstractions to include networking and indeed specifically TCP/IP networking (also not yet a thing in the late 1960s when Unix was designed) that Plan 9 profoundly simplifies the model. The "second system" here is not Plan 9. It is commercial Unix and the best example of it is the Linux kernel. Everything is in there. Drivers for all the hardware under the sun, dozens of protocols, dozens of processors. A "second system" is one that tries to include everything and becomes bloated and overcomplex. Plan 9 is the opposite of this. It is stripped down to the essentials, elegant and lean and honed. Which makes it hard to learn and hard to use and not very practical. Whereas once Unix escaped the original labs into industry, it became its own second system: big and over complicated. Then this got worse when it was reimplemented as FOSS when everyone could and did add in everything they wanted. What the term "second system" really means is the diametric opposite of what happened with Plan 9. Plan 9 is the tiny elegant core of a powerful idea, built by geniuses for geniuses and unfortunately too abstruse and theoretical and difficult for ordinary joes with their simple editors and simple conceptual models.
rswail 4y ago
Second system syndrome can happen with both systems sold commercially, and software systems used internally. I've seen both. Success is gauged in different ways for internal systems, supposed improved processes, efficiencies etc. There's no "market". Transparent distributed systems are the biggest thing now in software development, both private and public "cloud" are moving towards orchestration tools like Kubernetes, abstracting away the underlying CPU/memory/network hardware. People don't log in to systems to "administer" them anymore. Containers are cattle and thrown away when they break. This is much more prevalent than just "applications that can do clustering and distributed systems in the cases where it's necessary or helpful." People are finding that it's "necessary and helpful" for most software that is used commercially or personally.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  None of that transparency is done at the OS level today though, it is done in layers above that, and that's not some new thing that's just started now. It's obvious that's the way to go and trying to shoehorn some over engineered network transparency into a kernel never had any real justification or demand for it. It's not like Plan 9 was new with distributed systems or concepts or network transparency. You had many distributed systems, MOSIX, VMS, X11, NFS, etc all a decade or more before Plan 9. For the most part they were an academic obsession that's has mostly run out of steam these days replaced with local operating systems and layers on top of those which add the distributed support.

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
  >If something different had happened things might have been different. Maybe. You're absolutely right, this is too hazy and hand-wavy. Let's stick to what really matters: Plan 9 had no attributes of a "second system effect" as per the actual definition of the term. To paraphrase a famous quote: You keep using this term "second system effect". I don't think it means what you think it means.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    I notice you were unable address the parts of my comment where I showed it does fit the second system syndrome. That's what I suspected.

lproven 4y ago

> The reality is almost nobody wants it Hint: there is this thing called Kubernetes. It's quite successful now. It is a direct attempt to bodge onto Linux what Plan 9 did in the kernel. More examples... Microkernels: trying to turn a monolithic Unix kernel into a fleet of cooperating userspace servers, without using the filesystem as the comms mechanism as Plan 9 did. RPC: trying to bodge inter-node comms onto the standalone OS design of UNIX. The definition of the term "second system effect" is: « the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems » Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Plan 9 is dramatically smaller and simpler than mainstream UNIX systems, such as Linux. It is precisely and specifically the opposite of what you are claiming it to be.

throwawaylinux 4y ago
Notice how all these things are being done in the real world on Linux, a monolithic Unix derivative. I mean some of the connections you're trying to draw there are pretty shaky too, but I didn't say Plan 9 has no good ideas and nothing was ever learned from it. If you want something concrete, the actual 9p protocol is used to share certain resources between virtual machines in Linux today. I think certain aspects of mount, e.g., bind and union mounts at least came to Linux via Plan9 too. That's not my argument. I'm not saying Plan9 is garbage with no redeeming features. But it is generally a failure, and a victim of second system syndrome. > the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems Over-engineered being the important part, although that phrase is pretty arbitrary. It's obsessing and becoming irrationally myopic on certain parts of the system that the designers liked or may have been unique or interesting in the first system, in the mistaken belief that those are the important parts of the system. > Plan 9 is dramatically smaller and simpler than mainstream UNIX systems, such as Linux. Well naturally, Plan 9 is a relic, and was never more than a toy even when it wasn't.
- lproven 4y ago
  I think you profoundly misunderstand what is meant by the "second system effect" and this comment in no way addresses that issue. You're trying to redefine one term here but that does not defend your case. "Over-engineered" means "made more complex than it needs to be". More definitions: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/second-system-syndrome https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/second-system-syndro... https://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect https://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect The point of the second-system syndrome is that something is bigger and much more complex than its predecessor. Plan 9 is smaller, simpler, and cleaner than Unix, because whereas Unix was designed and built on and for standalone, text-based, terminal-driven minicomputers, Plan 9 was built for networked graphical workstations. The "graphical" part of that arguably is a liability, but the networked part is absolutely integral. All modern UNIX machines, to an approximation, are networked, and the Unix kernel at heart does not understand networking. This also applies to microkernel Unixes such as the HURD, Minix 3, and so on. The entire point of Plan 9 is that by considering the developing nature of Unix workstations and adapting the core Unix concepts to the concept of a network, by extending the kernel's core abstractions to include networking and indeed specifically TCP/IP networking (also not yet a thing in the late 1960s when Unix was designed) that Plan 9 profoundly simplifies the model. The "second system" here is not Plan 9. It is commercial Unix and the best example of it is the Linux kernel. Everything is in there. Drivers for all the hardware under the sun, dozens of protocols, dozens of processors. A "second system" is one that tries to include everything and becomes bloated and overcomplex. Plan 9 is the opposite of this. It is stripped down to the essentials, elegant and lean and honed. Which makes it hard to learn and hard to use and not very practical. Whereas once Unix escaped the original labs into industry, it became its own second system: big and over complicated. Then this got worse when it was reimplemented as FOSS when everyone could and did add in everything they wanted. What the term "second system" really means is the diametric opposite of what happened with Plan 9. Plan 9 is the tiny elegant core of a powerful idea, built by geniuses for geniuses and unfortunately too abstruse and theoretical and difficult for ordinary joes with their simple editors and simple conceptual models.

rswail 4y ago

Second system syndrome can happen with both systems sold commercially, and software systems used internally. I've seen both. Success is gauged in different ways for internal systems, supposed improved processes, efficiencies etc. There's no "market". Transparent distributed systems are the biggest thing now in software development, both private and public "cloud" are moving towards orchestration tools like Kubernetes, abstracting away the underlying CPU/memory/network hardware. People don't log in to systems to "administer" them anymore. Containers are cattle and thrown away when they break. This is much more prevalent than just "applications that can do clustering and distributed systems in the cases where it's necessary or helpful." People are finding that it's "necessary and helpful" for most software that is used commercially or personally.

throwawaylinux 4y ago
None of that transparency is done at the OS level today though, it is done in layers above that, and that's not some new thing that's just started now. It's obvious that's the way to go and trying to shoehorn some over engineered network transparency into a kernel never had any real justification or demand for it. It's not like Plan 9 was new with distributed systems or concepts or network transparency. You had many distributed systems, MOSIX, VMS, X11, NFS, etc all a decade or more before Plan 9. For the most part they were an academic obsession that's has mostly run out of steam these days replaced with local operating systems and layers on top of those which add the distributed support.