I am genuinely glad it was helpful! In general, what I am getting at is that Unix is a (?) uniquely weird situation that happens to have grown like Kudzu. It's

I am genuinely glad it was helpful! In general, what I am getting at is that Unix is a (?) uniquely weird situation that happens to have grown like Kudzu. It's an early generation of a long running project, where that early generation caught on and became massive and thus ignores simple but profound improvements from later versions of the same project. And since in that ecosystem, almost everything is built on a foundation of C, problems with C affect everything layered on top... even though they do not in any other ecosystem. But something like 99% of inhabitants of the ecosystem are not even aware that other ecosystems even exist, let alone knowing anything about them. If they know of any, it's macOS or Windows. macOS is also UNIX, and modern Windows is NT, which is Windows built with Unix tools and a Unix type design... so they are not really different at all. So what I am getting at is that Plan 9 has aspects other than the namespaces and the cosmetic aspects of the design. It makes changes to the language and how it's compiled that are just as important, and hacks to gain some of that on modern versions of the parent OS family are not of comparable significance. Famous quote: << So... the best way to compare programming languages is by analogy to cars. Lisp is a whole family of languages, and can be broken down approximately as follows: * Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio. * Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: "the car that's always in front of you." * Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle. >> Comparison: if somehow you make a pruned-down Howl's Moving Castle, you can probably never ever, whatever you do, no matter how much effort you invest, make it into something as small and light as the Subaru, let alone the sports car. In more detail: Let's imagine one team invented first the train, then the bicycle, then the car. The bicycle takes the idea of a wheeled vehicle from the train but reduces it down to an incredibly minimal version. It needs no fuel, just 2 wheels, but it is very simple, very light, and can go almost anywhere. Although you do need 1 per passenger, it's true, whereas a single carriage train can carry 100 people, you can make 100 bicycles for those 100 people with fewer materials than that 1 train, even excluding consideration of the rails etc. If someone still making trains looked at bicycles and inspired by them came up with a train with just 2 wheels, that balanced or hung from the track, they do not get to claim that they have successfully imported the simplicity of the bicycle. They have retained just one aspect and may have achieved savings in moving parts, or slight reduction of complexity, or a slightly simpler machine... but it's still a train. If you tweak a conventional C compiler to not waste time rereading text that has already been read once, or a disk cache obviates it, then you have not caught up with the advance I am trying to discuss here. For clarity, this is not my original thinking. This idea is from a Go talk over a decade ago: https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_5 https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_5.