13 ms·

UsesThis: Rob Pike

411 points by mace 14y ago

bovik 14y ago
That's a weird dude. That's all.
n8agrin 14y ago
I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. I'm always shocked that this hasn't happened faster. I've expected Dropbox, Amazon, Google and Apple to move into this space more aggressively, but at best they've all only just scraped the surface of what's possible.
- simonsarris 14y ago
  But Google has moved into that space! The general populace just didn't care too much.[1] Chromebooks do exactly what he's describing right off the bat. Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical. -------------------- [1] I think part of the reason for this is that just as nobody wants to think about things like death, NOBODY wants to think about data loss and prevention. It's like death, but harder to understand and to the common folk most people aren't even aware that there are options in this sphere. Even though a lot of people just use Facebook, email, IM and word processing, its going to be hard to convince them that something like a chromebook is a really good idea because the reasons its technically sweet are lost on them.
  - pilif 14y ago
    > Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical. unless of course some algorithm at Google decided that you are a bot and/or spammer. At that point, all your Chromebooks are useless and all your data is gone without any way for you to get it back. See the Amazon Kindle post from a cole of days ago. Don't get me wrong. In general I love the idea of having my data somewhere in the cloud where somebody else is working on keeping it save. But in case of emergencies, I would love to have somebody to talk to who is willing (and able) to help me. Unfortunately all services coming close to this vision are too big to be able to afford any customer support it seems.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      It is really a shame, bordering on suspicious, that Google Takeout doesn't include any approximately realtime sync APIs for maintaining an off-cloud copy of your life. Even at Microsoft's worst proprietary height, they could never delete your data.
      - hexis 14y ago
        Only in the Shuttleworthian sense of you already trust MSFT with your data.
      - Joeri 14y ago
        Why should you have to do that? Why can't google maintain proper backups? They could charge for it. Of course, that means they would need to guarantee they will never, ever, cut you off from your data, not even if you defraud them. Under EU law they basically have a legal obligation to do that, but sadly they don't feel compelled to comply with their legal obligations without a court ordering them to. By the way, if you've never had microsoft lose your data for you, you haven't been using their software for very long or been very very lucky. Admittedly, when microsoft did it they didn't mean to. Google and amazon mean to.
        89a 14y ago
        Probably the last company I'd ever want in charge of my data is one like Google who allows companies run riot and delete data they don't even own on YouTube.
      - sp332 14y ago
        Setting up and email or IM client to save your emails and IMs is pretty easy. Google Drive has a desktop client that syncs some documents in real-time (although it excludes documents made in Google Docs itself). You can use Picasa to sync photos from Instant Upload (which is inexplicably not integrated with Google Drive yet). I think that just leaves music... did I miss anything?
  - ryanstewart 14y ago
    This may be a matter of semantics but it seemed to me he pretty clearly avoided the word "cloud" in favor of "the network". Based on his post it seems like he's looking for something that's a bit more robust from an infrastructure standpoint than what most cloud offerings are today. Eg, not "stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh". That appears to be one reason he's not buying that people have moved into the space.
  - stevewilhelm 14y ago
    I think the Chromebook missed the boat for consumers. If it had a 128GB SSD drive that automatically synched to Google Drive, then it would useful. Now it just doesn't work for photo, video, and music editing, as well as HD movie viewing on the road. In its current configuration, it's an anemic iPad with a keyboard.
- zvrba 14y ago
  I haven't yet seen a product that emulates a disk over the network with acceptable latency over anything other than LAN. Until this happens, networked storage (except backup) is a no-go for me.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    For video editing, sure. But for text editing, the web woks.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  Because there are sane people that prefer to take care of their precious data, instead of giving it to strangers.
- negativity 14y ago
  First Order of Business: The thought police have to weed out the service providers that won't play ball. We can't have any rogue independent thought enablers like Kim Dotcom floating around. So for now, while there are enough bit players and small-time shops floating around, people are still wary about losing their data to fly-by-night operations. Unreliable SSD's and Stuxnet infected flash drives have shaken user confidence in personal storage, but not enough. And it still doesn't seem possible to create enough doubt in HDDs, while selling the con job of cloud storage. Also, there're enough data breaches floating around, but most people just shrug, and whether they understand what it means, or even care is hard to discern... Anyway, once all the captains of industry are on board, with their poster children like Pike parroting the party line, and when the all the "OMG LYFETIEM DATA GUARANTEES" seem more reliable than the normal hard drive warranties available to the common prole, it'll finally be possible to memory-hole the fuck out of anyone that steps out of line. (I'm looking at you, Mr. Assange) C'mon man. The name of the game is "Boiling Frogs". It has to be done slowly, and carefully. I shouldn't have to explain this.
  - jff 14y ago
    yeah WAKE UP SHEEPLE (christ, dude)
    - qdog 14y ago
      Oh man, I almost forgot we were SHEEPLE. wipes tear from eye Thanks for that. In all seriousness, heavily encrypted, anonymous datablocks that people just 'back-up' on the net (I'm not advancing to the word cloud, sorry) is a pretty good idea. Trusting Google or anyone else to protect your raw data forever is probably not a good bet.
- buster 14y ago
  I suppose Dropbox is just a poor replacement for the completely "on the network" world that Rob Pike imagines. It's merely more then a convenient backup solution with some nifty tooling around.
pgbovine 14y ago
i will +1 his love for the 11" MacBook Air ... people are always skeptical that i can do pretty much all of my work on it (yes, even some coding), but after almost two years, i still haven't found its small size to be too limiting.
- activepeanut 14y ago
  Has the small size affected your vision? I've briefly tried working on a small screen with high DPI and it really hurt my eyes. Maybe I'm getting old-man's eyes. ;)
  - stock_toaster 14y ago
    Same here. I currently have an older (mid 2009) 15" mbp. Wondering if I can get by on a 13" though...
    - petercooper 14y ago
      If you get a new 13" Retina MBP, you'll have the best of all worlds. If you need a lower res, you got it. If you need a higher res, you got it. I hadn't anticipated this but since every resolution looks excellent on a retina display, I'm switching quite often for different tasks.
      - stock_toaster 14y ago
        Thanks for the anecdote. I will indeed check out the 13" retina.
  - josephlord 14y ago
    High DPI should be better for your eyes and easier to read as the jaggies will be less visible. This does assume that you keep sizes the same and just put more pixels into every element.
- tesseractive 14y ago
  I had a netbook that size. I liked everything about the form factor, it was just cripplingly slow.
mturmon 14y ago
He plants a couple of nice flags: "This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary." and "In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work."
- mmariani 14y ago
  These are the points that most held my attention. I think too we're going in the wrong direction breaking up things and stitching them up again with technologies that weren't made for that. Although I think this strategy fits well the planned obsolescence policies we have widely deployed in the tech industry nowadays.
  - prunebeads 14y ago
    That's interesting, but what would be the alternative? Rob Pike's dream setup "is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world. The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours." In this situation, there would be public phones, public computers available in sufficient quantity everywhere. Think of the necessary amount of work to install, maintain, and upgrade such a setup. In a capitalist society, there would be different brands providing access to their own solutions, and thus a lot of Blackberry, Apple, or <your favorite carrier> kiosks all over the place. You could think that with such a scheme, costs would prohibit a rapid evolution of services, as we witness them in current business models. Would we get the iKiosks updated each year with new firmware, or the latest multitouch screens? In comparison, how much money is being poured by individuals in upgrades for their personal stuff? What is the overall cost (i.e. money that could be spent on something else). There's the real estate issue also. How much space would be consumed by those kiosks, and how much would it cost? It would be interesting to estimate all the pros and cons of that dream setup, and compare it with our current situation.
Andrex 14y ago
I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that. Interesting that someone so steeped in the "old ways" of Unix dumb terminals is also, seemingly, such a good matchup for the "far future" vision of Chrome OS. What's old is new again?
- n8agrin 14y ago
  What's old is always new, especially on the Internet. I'm constantly reminded of the "Simpsons' did it" South Park episode whenever I'm reading press briefs about new startups.
- acuozzo 14y ago
  Rob Pike was one of the earliest advocates __against__ the use of traditional "dumb" terminals (including the "smart" ones, e.g., DEC's VT-100+ line). Early on, he developed Blit and brought the mouse to Unix. Later, he helped develop Plan 9, an operating system that's far more advanced (in some respects) than what we have today. He is not and has never been "steeped in the 'old ways'".
batgaijin 14y ago
I always wonder, how do people like this justify their level of trust for cloud providers and the government? It's as if a majority of the hardcore hackers have gone "Fuck it, I'm being watched anyway, they might as well be backing up my stuff as well." Are we past the point of it being a topic of debate except by people like me who have the illusion of choice?
- Uhhrrr 14y ago
  Well, he does work for a cloud provider. Also, he might just have a lot of faith in encryption (although he doesn't mention it).
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Encryption? In the cloud? Only if you deploy your own app stack.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      Encrypt locally, push to the cloud. See: Tarsnap.
damian2000 14y ago
His dream setup: "... carry a computer screen around, as long as it rolled up and fit inside something the size of a pen and had touch input when unrolled. As long as it had no local storage." How last century. I thought he would have at least suggested a hologram projection screen combined with some bio implants. ;-)
mdonahoe 14y ago
If you haven't seen acme in action, it is pretty crazy and interesting. Basically it makes heavy use of the mouse, and any typed word can be invoked like a command. Here is a tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M
- wyclif 14y ago
  The mousing is what lost me. I love vim because you don't have to deal with the mouse at all.
  - jff 14y ago
    The mousing is what adds a crazy amount of power. You end up with dozens of files on screen, some showing text, some just displayed as the "tag" line. You use the mouse to rapidly jump around them, select text from one, paste into another, etc. The mouse is a pointing device, why not use it to point at things? If I have 3 columns in my acme window (which I usually do) and I'm working in the 3rd file down in the left-most column, it's faster to get to the top file in the right-most column by just grabbing the mouse and clicking than by futzing with key combos.
    - wyclif 14y ago
      You make a good case for acme; I'd be willing to try it. But I'm not convinced that in any context grabbing the mouse (with or without chording) is faster than keying, esp. since in vim many of the most important navigational keys are on the home row.
      - jff 14y ago
        You really need to try it, if nothing else it will broaden your experience so you can compare vi vs. emacs vs. acme. Myself, I watch vim users spend so much time just trying to get their cursors to the appropriate part of the file/line, and then select the appropriate text, that I scratch my head--this is faster? By the time you've figured out that typing "/whatev" should be sufficient to get you to the point you want, I could have grabbed the mouse, simply pointed it to the location I'm interested, and had my hands back on the keyboard already. Don't get me wrong, I also use vi a lot because it's very convenient and very powerful, but there are some things I'm much happier with in Acme.
notJim 14y ago
Some very interesting stuff here. Everyone should look at this screencast about the acme text editor: http://research.swtch.com/acme http://research.swtch.com/acme. This thing is wild and crazy in a way that's totally unexpected. I have no idea if the ideas are actually good, but they sure are different.
fra 14y ago
"The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that." It exists! It's called a sunray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray
- maxerickson 14y ago
  Does Sun Ray make a phone? Of course I'm not serious, but the Sunray is one stack of technology that offers stateful session management, not a system for using the same computing environment on whatever hardware you happen to have at hand.
  - fra 14y ago
    Touche, but they make a desktop client (oracle virtual desktop) and even an ipad app. Pretty good, but I agree it isn't yet enough.
andrewflnr 14y ago
I can't get behind the idea of every computer I interact with being a dumb terminal. I don't want to assume I'll always have a connection to the mother machine. Even in some ideal world where I always have a high speed connection that never fails, can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down? Not really. I would like to see a nice balance: I basically work locally, and anything I do is synced ASAP to "the cloud" and thence to other devices (and other people). But if I'm in the hills or the server goes down, hey, I still have a perfectly good computer in my pocket.
- AngryParsley 14y ago
  I agree. In addition to the concerns you brought up, I see other issues with Pike's proposal. If computers are infrastructure, I'm forced to deal with whatever computers others have. This is a problem, because most people don't use computers as much as me and aren't willing to spend as much on them. I'd rather carry a maxed-out 11" Air everywhere than put up with my friends' and relatives' computers. (In fact, I do this.) Pike doesn't address security either. Would you log into Gmail on a public computer? Would you enter your credit card info or visit your bank's website? I sure wouldn't. Phones from 20 years ago didn't have any storage or computational abilities, so these security concerns didn't exist for them. While I'm a huge fan of cloud-based storage and synchronization, there are just too many issues with using untrusted computers everywhere I go. Maybe it was due to the interview format, but I'm surprised such an intelligent, technical thinker managed to avoid discussing the downsides of his proposal.
  - rojoca 14y ago
    Don't forget that this is Pike's ideal setup. Presumably in this "ideal" the security issues no longer exist and my "setup" is available at any interface I interact with - instantly.
  - lazyjones 14y ago
    As you noticed yourself, the "dumber" the devices are, the more secure they will be. I'd happily log on to my e-mail account from a device that (I knew) booted an OS image from ROM just before I used it (comparable to those live CD-ROMs for secure applications like e-banking). Let's go back to burning ROMs for OS upgrades instead of flashing/storing them on disk! People can replace batteries, so they shouldn't have trouble replacing an OS ROM ..
epaga 14y ago
Slight critique here - I feel like he's using this to push an agenda rather than just telling us in detail what tools and software he uses to get his job done. He mentions a few things but in far less detail than anyone else I've read on usesthis. Instead he gives paragraph after paragraph of "world view" about moving things to the cloud...interesting, yes, but not what I'm after when I read usesthis posts... :-/
- waferbaby 14y ago
  Aw, sorry about that. I guess it's a nice break from the normality, maybe? :)
  - statictype 14y ago
    I liked it. It's nice to see a guy's thoughts on how he thinks computing should be. Especially if its someone like Rob Pike. (Better than the usual stream of Macbook-Pro-with-24"-Cinema-Display which is what everyone seems to be using)
    - waferbaby 14y ago
      Yup! Agreed.
    - jff 14y ago
      Macbook Pro, vim, and git. Honestly, when there's a discussion of people's work setup on HN, that's kind of what I assume it's going to be.
      - nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
        Don't forget about those crazy people that use emacs instead of vim...
        acuozzo 14y ago
        Also, don't forget about those even crazier people (e.g., myself) who prefer a more traditional vi (e.g., nvi) to vim.
codewright 14y ago
A surprisingly ideological interview. Combined with my run-ins with the go-nuts, I have to imagine there's some sort of general cultural coding cohort I've not fully understood yet. This intersection between an obsession with minimalism of a particular sort and dispossession is unknown to me. Seems common to the Go programmers I talk to.
- cokernel_hacker 14y ago
  My general take from observing their culture is dogmatic vs pragmatic. plan9 and go are dogmatic, they exist because the status quo is bad and something must be done. This is not to say their ideas are bad! Some of them are great but many of the great ones are brought into the mainstream thru unix (procfs, utf-8) and C (unnamed substructures) :) I just wished they focused on making the mainstream better instead of this more indirect route...
  - p9idf 14y ago
    >[Plan 9 exists] because the status quo is bad and something must be done. That's a strange way to describe research and experimentation (though not strictly incorrect). >I just wished they focused on making the mainstream better Plan 9 predates all of today's mainstream operating systems.
    - cokernel_hacker 14y ago
      > That's a strange way to describe research and experimentation (though not strictly incorrect). Many of the modern OS research papers that I have read take an existing solution and mess with it. As an example, many file system papers take ext[34] or btrfs and do something to them (if we want to debate this statement, we can). I see this with replacement algorithms, packet schedulers, etc. Much experimentation happens but it is usually in the context of Linux or FreeBSD or some other popular existing solution these days. There are papers that buck this more conventional approach like barrelfish and singularity and exokernels and L4 etc. etc. etc. I do not think they are the status quo and I am/was not saying that plan9 is a bad thing, let me be clear on that. >Plan 9 predates all of today's mainstream operating systems. This is said with enough certainty without being true that I am allergic to it. All? Plan 9 started in the late 80's [1] OS X/iOS is a mach derivative which is circa 1985. The NT OS/2 project which begat modern Windows was started in 1988. BSD? All descendants of BSD which first released in 1977. Rob Pike complains about BSD's "cat -v" in the early 80's. Maybe you are using "predate" with a different connotation but I don't know which. At the very best* it co-existed with the others. [1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
kaptain 14y ago
Rob Pike doesn't want a dumb terminal. He wants a powerful new infrastructure. My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world. I can relate to what he wants: he cares about his data, not about what his data is on. Every time I upgrade machines or move to a different machine, I have to either reconstruct my environment or I have to tolerate an absence of some data that would be nice to have. How amazing would it be if I can could use any 'terminal' anywhere and have complete access to all of my personal data without having to tote around a physical piece of hardware that's 'mine'. Any geek's 'bat-cave' is testament to this need: a Mac Plus sitting underneath a table next to Commodore 64. On top of the table lays a 486 DX/2 PC with Super VGA and a Soundblaster compatible card decaying inside. Everywhere strings of SCSI, RS-232, Ethernet spaghetti encircle cases of floppies (both 5.25 and 3.5). Where's the data? Anything precious has made it's way through different formats to whatever you're on now. Everything else is slowly rotting away. Outsourcing the batcave to this ubiquitous seems much more appetizing to me. Plus it leaves me room for my 1st and 2nd gen Transformer collection.
mrpollo 14y ago
"The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere." Reminds me of the mini glass that Tony Stark is carrying with him all around the 2nd Iron Man movie, see here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9694286/iron-man-computer.jpeg https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9694286/iron-man-computer.jpeg In the movie Tony (Iron Man) can control the infrastructure around him with this device, just like Rob Pike described.
wowoc 14y ago
All these esteemed people must be such individualists. They all use Macs.
- waferbaby 14y ago
  Hah! Not all :) http://usesthis.com/interviews/windows http://usesthis.com/interviews/windows http://usesthis.com/interviews/linux http://usesthis.com/interviews/linux
- jfb 14y ago
  Because the only reason to use a Mac is to fit in by being cool, of course.
- frou_dh 14y ago
  Are you saying that individualism in this game is more about what is incidentally used than what is created with it?
meaty 14y ago
At the risk of causing a flamewar, it sounds like he wants Microsoft surface. It has all of those attributes when backed by SkyDrive apart from the fact you can't roll it up.
- acuozzo 14y ago
  Can you go to any other Microsoft Surface and see exactly what you saw on your own, including (but not limited to) your programs, data, and configuration/profile? Also, will the state of that other Microsoft Surface be exactly what yours was when you left it? That is, will your browser window located at (314, 159) with 6 tabs open and an HN post written in tab #2 appear on this other Microsoft Surface exactly as you left it on your own? If not, then the Microsoft Surface may not fit the bill. This is what you get with Plan 9 and a shared file server.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Not entirely but 90% of it. Your programs, data and profile will move around and be cached if you sign in with a Live account. Some application state may be persisted differently but when you sign in to another PC, it'll all move across slowly. plan9 doesn't do what he wants either. You can't detach a window station from the 9p network and take it and all your data with you. Communication networks aren't reliable enough to maintain a 9p connection either. At least surface handles this... Hell RDP'ing into the office is the same as what he wants...
nnq 14y ago
The whole "everything in the cloud", "let someone else worry about storage" view, at least the way he promotes them, are more like VCS than let's say Git (or pick another DVCS)... you have a conceptual "central" point of failure, even if this "point" is a network of servers distributed around the world. I want STORAGE ON EVERY DEVICE (not volatile!), and and automatic system to sync it with all my other devices, WITHOUT NEEDING THE CLOUD, just set up and ad-hoc mesh network and sync everyth (yeah, there's gonna be smth like "merges" for OS settings and music collection changes but I can do with that). The "cloud" should be just infrastructure, nothing else added, and I shouldn't be distrupted when my connection to it fails... "Always connected"? No, no, no, I'll always want to be able to work offline and be able to sync/merge/push/pull even my OS, its settings and software (and be able to "branch" my and keep multiple versions of software and all that). DVCS should be the models for how to do everything in the cloud, with simpler interfaces for different level of user needs/competency. Rob Pike's ideal of "homogeneity" in computing really misses the distinction between distributed and central syncing, the security and reliability implications etc. ...and large local storage capacity and "enough" computing power on all devices is needed for this. I'd rather be "part of the mesh" than "connected to the cloud mesh", because I think the distinctions are important and they require different things from "client devices" (all devices should be "clients"! no servers "in the cloud" for me please!)
- justincormack 14y ago
  That is the CouchDB model. It is very appealing...
  - nnq 14y ago
    in a narrow sense... yet I've always wondered why people don't choose the master-master model of doing things more often...
    - lucian1900 14y ago
      Because it's hard to do, and even harder to do right. You at least need immutable data and versioning, and you still have to do something about conflicts.
buro9 14y ago
> When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that. For me, Dropbox has brought me that. I still use Github and the like, but my computers now share such a similar setup (all Linux, install Go, install Dropbox, install Sublime Text 2, done) that I can walk out of the office without doing anything special to my machine, go home and pick up literally where I left off. My git repositories are cloned into my Dropbox folders so that when I move from one place to another but am not ready to check in (local branch in state of flux) I still have that in multiple locations. As Sublime Text 2 stores the project and file info in a plain text file, that state comes with me too. My $GOROOT is also in my Dropbox folder, so if I've grabbed something via "go get" that also follows me around. I view Dropbox as an ever present working cache, not as storage. Things like documents are in Google Drive and accessed via the browser. On Friday I went to a meeting at 3pm that I thought would just be 20 minutes. It turned out that it took 3 hours, and I hadn't closed ST2 or anything I was working on... no problem, I went home instead of back to the office and my work was exactly where I left off with the same files open in ST2. I think the only thing that doesn't follow with me are the undo buffers in ST2.
- minikomi 14y ago
  Woah. I'm plopping my vim, zsh, tmux & go stuff in there tonight & symlinking where appropriate. Thanks!
- jlouis 14y ago
  There is an important difference though. You are sharing your data, but you are not sharing your programs and their current setup. That is, if you forget to save your file, it won't be on Dropbox. Plan9 is way more persistent here, as it has a lot of tools which can be brought back to the state you left them in on one machine. It is awfully nice to have a persistent environment. Dropbox is definitely partway towards that goal, but it doesn't hammer in the nail fully.
  - p9idf 14y ago
    If you forget to save your file, it won't be on your Plan 9 file server either. The only program which has the state persistence you describe is acme which can dump its state to a file and load it again later, but most every editor on every operating system can do that. And you have to run the Dump command manually, so if you forget, you lose your state the same as you would if you forgot to save before unplugging your terminal.
mseepgood 14y ago
I like how his photo matches the colors of the blog design (pink & grey), obviously on purpose. This tells me that he pays attention to detail. Not every Unix hacker would change his clothes for some random interview on the web.
sturadnidge 14y ago
I don't think his phone system analogy is correct. Yes, you can pick up any phone and make a call, but you can't receive a call to 'your' number from any phone. i.e. there is still state associated with the phone network, and landlines are not portable in the same sense that mobiles and laptops are.
fafner 14y ago
I'm a bit surprised that he is happy with a Mac Book. His editor acme requires three mouse buttons and Apple is designed for one mouse button use. Does he use an external mouse all the time? And I'm a bit disappointed that he's not using Plan9. With the current ease of VMs there are no driver and installation issues and he could move the snapshot around.
- aes256 14y ago
  Surely he can use gestures instead of physical buttons? Certainly gestures make the difference between one and two button trackpads a non-issue — if anything, I find it easier and more natural than reaching for a separate button — and it can't be too difficult to scale this to three buttons.
  - enneff 14y ago
    Mouse clicks in acme usually accompany precise cursor positioning, so I don't think gestures would work well.
- jlouis 14y ago
  You can use acme with a MacBook. First of all Cmd-x, Cmd-c and Cmd-v works. Second, Cmd and Option with the mousepad gives you clicks on buttons 2 and 3. Still I prefer to have a mouse when I am working on larger texts because it is so much easier to do text rearrangement with a mouse. A correctly set up acme on a mac is surprisingly effective.
  - EdwardCoffin 14y ago
    You answered most of the question I came here to ask. How about chording though? I'm under the impression that there are actions that are triggered by all three mouse buttons simultaneously. I'm hoping to give acme a serious try (I have it installed), but I need to be sure I won't have to start using a three button mouse rather than whatever is provided by my system.
    - 14y ago
cturner 14y ago
I like the no-local-storage dream. But what about when you're at the airport or the hotel network is broken or on holiday in indochina, and want to do some hacking? There's probably no network, or if there is it'll be expensive, slow and unreliable. Though I struggle with git, I love it that you can easily keep a tree pulled (even if you don't actively use it), and use that when you need it.
nicholassmith 14y ago
I like his ideal, all the work being accessible no matter what device you've got in front of you but the whole idea only works with ubiquitous network connectivity. I commute a couple of hours most days through areas where the 3G quality is non-existant to poor, occasionally reaching 'Usable', so I'd be doomed to being unproductive. Caching gets you so far, but there's still plenty of rough spots to the idea. It's definitely a nice idea though, maybe some day it'll happen. Nice to see Rob Pike getting a usesthis.com post, slightly (but not much) surprised to see him using Macs as his primary choice.
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flyfireli 14y ago
Thank you for your post! (2012 Best Swiss watches: http://www.watchesreplica001.com http://www.watchesreplica001.com)
lazyjones 14y ago
Some of us do not like the cloud as much as Rob Pike because we are worried about censorship and corporate misconduct (what do you do if your stuff is suddenly gone one day?). The "always accessible" and "continue where you left" paradigmata we can still relate to though: I've been using screen in ssh / putty windows for almost 20 years now, I used VNC for some time (even wrote a 16 bit client for DOS that ran off a floppy disk and with 2MB RAM...) for the same purpose. Something like VNC but with a "responsive" UI that adapts to the device currently used (tablet, laptop, desktop) while still retaining all the state needed for the user to continue where he left, that'd be something novel and useful after all these years.
Millennium 14y ago
Count me in as another "synchronized local storage" person, for the typical two reasons: I don't want to rely on a connection to the cloud, and I don't want to have to trust the cloud storage providers.
aperture 14y ago
I think it was a good post overall, but what got to me was his lack of doing anything about his issues. When Mr. Pike wanted a revolutionary OS, plan9 was created. When Mr. Pike wanted a language fixing problems dealt with in C, Go was created. When it comes to a machine that's roll-able without persistent local storage, he merely wishes for it to be a reality? I can understand if, through working with Google, the only research in that area is tied to the Chromebook, but still. He certainly has the capability to cause influence (First link on hn), but he's not getting into the core of the problem. I love this guy just as much as the rest of the community, but I find it puzzling steps aren't already being taken to make this next dream of his a reality. I also agree that cloud is not the answer for everything, so it would be enlightening for a new tablet-esque roll able device to be made that swims against the general Mac-inspired cloud tablet trend. But if Rob Pike isn't going to make it a reality, I doubt someone else will release it in his vision or to his liking. Perhaps he has a few ideas or tricks to make things "just work". And that's what I'd look forward to.
- tree_of_item 14y ago
  The 9p protocol addresses a lot of the network activity described in the article, but I'm not sure what Rob Pike could do to make the hardware he describes a reality. All the examples you gave were software.
  - pi18n 14y ago
    Surely Rob Pike could get funding to start a hardware company, especially if the aim is going to be low powered devices connecting to cloud services?
shadowmint 14y ago
I clicked the link seeing the high point count and thinking I might find some gems of productivity I could pull into my own daily routine, but instead I found some discussion of clouds and terminals and other things that are philosophically interesting but tangibly well argued and discussed ad nauseam. Of course, the article is tiny and talks abstractly about something that everyone has an opinion on, so of course it has up lots of votes. I am disappoint.
dschiptsov 14y ago
ACME screencast is definitely worth looking. It is the "everything is text [streams]" and GUI concepts together in action.
- ninjin 14y ago
  I have to say, it is an amazing concept and very tempting, especially the way you create links in unstructured text. The only reason I am not trying it out right now is that it would require an X-server wherever I go in order to do proper editing and my current tmux set-up wouldn't work.
pi18n 14y ago
I've wondered for a while now, why isn't Plan 9 rising along with cloud computing? It seems like it would mesh very well with having many computers connected in a network, and might make tasks like massively distributed map/reduce more accessible.
- mhd 14y ago
  What part would you be interested in? Pretty much everything that Plan 9 has is available in some kind of fashion for other operating systems, often in a more specialized manner. And by the time you hack the performance and compatibility into Plan 9's kernel and drivers (if its minimalism would allow it), you could port/re-implement most of what you'd be missing. The main part that made this distributed nature possible was 9P, a network protocol/file system. And distributed file systems are a dime a dozen now. Hadoop, S3, GFS, GlusterFS are all vital elements of "the cloud", never mind old staples like NFS, AFS etc. For "cloud needs", they're better suited (fault tolerance, performance…). The big thing about Plan 9 (and Bell Laps software in general) wasn't its novelty, but its scope, narrowing down everything in a typical network environment down to a few protocols, APIs and GUIs. Not really all that applicable for serving bits to browsers. Never mind the bandwidth. Plan 9 was mostly text in a LAN.
prunebeads 14y ago
Personally, I switched to a tiled WM because I didn't want to go back and forth between keyboard and mouse all the time. I want an editor which I can handle using keyboard alone, and only use the mouse when I really have to (web, drawing, games - perhaps I should use a trackball). Acme relies too much on the mouse for me, but I like the idea a lot. There's another couple of issues: syntax highlighting, large scale refactoring (which is not easy either with vi or emacs atm). However, once you get accustomed to a certain workflow, it becomes difficult to accept something new. Maybe I should give it a shot.
- 4ad 14y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by large scale refactoring, but refactoring is much easier in acme compared to any editor I used before because of the powerful sam command language[1] and structural regular expressions[2]. [1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/sam/sam.pdf http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/sam/sam.pdf [2] http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf
  - prunebeads 14y ago
    I mean for instance changing the name of a value across multiple files, or fixing calls of a function whose prototype had been modified. That sort of things. There are other services that an IDE can provide: - name completion - list of variables in current scope - list of visible types - access to documentation - code annotation All these could be implemented in external tools, but how snappy would the interface be? The filter paradigm of Unix is great for batch processing, but fails when used interactively, unless processi are lightened to the point of becoming almost like threads within the same process, and with the matching communication speed (inter process communication using pipes isn't really that fast compared to shared memory). That said, maybe large scale programs are the problem to begin with. With simple, one task focused programs, source code becomes easy to maintain without resorting to the services I listed above. It's not easy to get rid of them though (consider compilers for instance).
    - 14y ago
programminggeek 14y ago
Using ssh, screen, and a prgmr instance, I can access my stuff and have the same state for almost all of my dev work anywhere I can use a chrome browser with the ssh plugin or any ssh terminal app. That is pretty close to what he's talking about I suppose. As of now my iphone, ipad, and laptop can all jump on my little instance and I'm good to go. That being said, I don't think going 100% cloud is for everybody yet, but we're getting closer.
- jff 14y ago
  Using ssh and screen gives you a 1975 interface to the computer. You've just made your own dumb terminal, doing EVERYTHING on the remote system except printing out a stream of characters to the local screen. It's not even as smart as the Blit that Rob Pike designed in 1982; at least that had the capability to fetch configuration from the server to set itself up.
fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
I dream of Rob's dream setup as well. I suspect many people do. But I hope it shouldn't be too hard to make it a reality. A smart phone which is always connected to remote storage (the cost could be a problem here?), and how about an electronic paper keyboard which rolls up to the size of a pen, that's somehow attached to or part of the phone. Sit down somewhere, connect, unroll the keyboard, and there is your computing environment.
awakeasleep 14y ago
My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world. The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours. Wow that sounds like a dream!
njharman 14y ago
Dude has style!
stcredzero 14y ago
> What would be your dream setup? I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. This is exactly my idea of changing from our current memory hierarchy to take advantage of the new SSD and cloud capabilities we have now: "Fat Cache." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544522
peterwwillis 14y ago
Payphones are annoying. It might be broken, or have gum jammed in it, or someone might be using it, or you have to track one down, and you have to be sitting at it to receive a call. Cellphones are in your pocket, come with your personal phone directory, are cheaper per minute, and you don't have to stand still to use them. I'm really surprised that Rob thinks people would want to deal with a computer-as-payphone model. And wireless data networks suck ass in North America. His ideal world is probably at least 20 years away. On the other hand, I love thin terminals. Screw local stateless networked computation. Give me a snappy remote interface to a beefy terminal server and i'm happy. That's an interface you literally can pick back up at any time with no performance cost due to being far away from the data.
car54whereareu 14y ago
Rob also uses tinted glasses and that shirt. I doubt the awesome bits of plan9 that he compared to a telephone (pay phone) can be replicated by a higher level service like amazon/google cloud something, git or some other dvcs. 9p is a protocol after all. He also mentioned doing computing somewhere else, and not just storing data in the cloud. So please tell me I just need to configure git differently or sign up for amazons newest whatever. This seems relevant as well http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/ http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/
wwkeyboard 14y ago
Maybe we can ask him what its like to be coding at 50? For a serious question, does acme lend itself to a chording keyboard? It seems like this is taking another step towards Engelbert's vision in the mother of all demos.
seacond 14y ago
Many of the things he says I agree with, others I don't. I think that's the thing with computing. Everyone's tastes are at least slightly different. We don't all want exactly the same things. I think the big failure is programmers' inability to bring these desired advances, like what Plan 9 achieved, to a wider audience. I mean, he says he had this wondwerful environment at Bell Labs, but almost no one outside of Bell Labs gets to experience that pleasure. Why not? They open sourced it too late? I'm not sure I buy that. It's still better than UNIX, so what's changed? It's like there's some assumption that people just don't deserve anything better, and there's no point in working towards it. Except if you're at Bell Labs. We're stuck with old UNIX, with all of its historical cruft. Like him, I've just learned to cope with it. (It's funny he's complaining about argv limits (see 2004 Slashdot interview). That seems to suggest he likes to compose super long argv's. No? Maybe he does not like xargs? I never did. But then I've seen similarly unexplainable limits in the Plan 9 port to UNIX. Why can't I have a Plan 9 sed command file with a very large number of commands?) We could certainly have better. Perhaps it's simply a matter of getting behind the right projects, instead of just following the money and being lazy... working at Google and buying MacBook Pros. That's sort of like giving up. Complacency. Honestly, "grep'ing the web" just doesn't sound all that "amazing" to me. I don't care how many servers they have running, Google is not Bell Labs.
16s 14y ago
I'm hesitant to move to the cloud until privacy issues are fundamentally addressed. All these vendors pouring over user data is not in our interest. I think it will take laws and government action to stop this sort of privacy invasion. Until that happens, I'll keep my local storage.

UsesThis: Rob Pike

411 points by mace 14y ago

bovik 14y ago

That's a weird dude. That's all.

n8agrin 14y ago

simonsarris 14y ago
But Google has moved into that space! The general populace just didn't care too much.[1] Chromebooks do exactly what he's describing right off the bat. Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical. -------------------- [1] I think part of the reason for this is that just as nobody wants to think about things like death, NOBODY wants to think about data loss and prevention. It's like death, but harder to understand and to the common folk most people aren't even aware that there are options in this sphere. Even though a lot of people just use Facebook, email, IM and word processing, its going to be hard to convince them that something like a chromebook is a really good idea because the reasons its technically sweet are lost on them.
- pilif 14y ago
  > Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical. unless of course some algorithm at Google decided that you are a bot and/or spammer. At that point, all your Chromebooks are useless and all your data is gone without any way for you to get it back. See the Amazon Kindle post from a cole of days ago. Don't get me wrong. In general I love the idea of having my data somewhere in the cloud where somebody else is working on keeping it save. But in case of emergencies, I would love to have somebody to talk to who is willing (and able) to help me. Unfortunately all services coming close to this vision are too big to be able to afford any customer support it seems.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    It is really a shame, bordering on suspicious, that Google Takeout doesn't include any approximately realtime sync APIs for maintaining an off-cloud copy of your life. Even at Microsoft's worst proprietary height, they could never delete your data.
    - hexis 14y ago
      Only in the Shuttleworthian sense of you already trust MSFT with your data.
    - Joeri 14y ago
      Why should you have to do that? Why can't google maintain proper backups? They could charge for it. Of course, that means they would need to guarantee they will never, ever, cut you off from your data, not even if you defraud them. Under EU law they basically have a legal obligation to do that, but sadly they don't feel compelled to comply with their legal obligations without a court ordering them to. By the way, if you've never had microsoft lose your data for you, you haven't been using their software for very long or been very very lucky. Admittedly, when microsoft did it they didn't mean to. Google and amazon mean to.
      - 89a 14y ago
        Probably the last company I'd ever want in charge of my data is one like Google who allows companies run riot and delete data they don't even own on YouTube.
    - sp332 14y ago
      Setting up and email or IM client to save your emails and IMs is pretty easy. Google Drive has a desktop client that syncs some documents in real-time (although it excludes documents made in Google Docs itself). You can use Picasa to sync photos from Instant Upload (which is inexplicably not integrated with Google Drive yet). I think that just leaves music... did I miss anything?
- ryanstewart 14y ago
  This may be a matter of semantics but it seemed to me he pretty clearly avoided the word "cloud" in favor of "the network". Based on his post it seems like he's looking for something that's a bit more robust from an infrastructure standpoint than what most cloud offerings are today. Eg, not "stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh". That appears to be one reason he's not buying that people have moved into the space.
- stevewilhelm 14y ago
  I think the Chromebook missed the boat for consumers. If it had a 128GB SSD drive that automatically synched to Google Drive, then it would useful. Now it just doesn't work for photo, video, and music editing, as well as HD movie viewing on the road. In its current configuration, it's an anemic iPad with a keyboard.
zvrba 14y ago
I haven't yet seen a product that emulates a disk over the network with acceptable latency over anything other than LAN. Until this happens, networked storage (except backup) is a no-go for me.
- Evbn 14y ago
  For video editing, sure. But for text editing, the web woks.
pjmlp 14y ago
Because there are sane people that prefer to take care of their precious data, instead of giving it to strangers.
negativity 14y ago
First Order of Business: The thought police have to weed out the service providers that won't play ball. We can't have any rogue independent thought enablers like Kim Dotcom floating around. So for now, while there are enough bit players and small-time shops floating around, people are still wary about losing their data to fly-by-night operations. Unreliable SSD's and Stuxnet infected flash drives have shaken user confidence in personal storage, but not enough. And it still doesn't seem possible to create enough doubt in HDDs, while selling the con job of cloud storage. Also, there're enough data breaches floating around, but most people just shrug, and whether they understand what it means, or even care is hard to discern... Anyway, once all the captains of industry are on board, with their poster children like Pike parroting the party line, and when the all the "OMG LYFETIEM DATA GUARANTEES" seem more reliable than the normal hard drive warranties available to the common prole, it'll finally be possible to memory-hole the fuck out of anyone that steps out of line. (I'm looking at you, Mr. Assange) C'mon man. The name of the game is "Boiling Frogs". It has to be done slowly, and carefully. I shouldn't have to explain this.
- jff 14y ago
  yeah WAKE UP SHEEPLE (christ, dude)
  - qdog 14y ago
    Oh man, I almost forgot we were SHEEPLE. wipes tear from eye Thanks for that. In all seriousness, heavily encrypted, anonymous datablocks that people just 'back-up' on the net (I'm not advancing to the word cloud, sorry) is a pretty good idea. Trusting Google or anyone else to protect your raw data forever is probably not a good bet.
buster 14y ago
I suppose Dropbox is just a poor replacement for the completely "on the network" world that Rob Pike imagines. It's merely more then a convenient backup solution with some nifty tooling around.

pgbovine 14y ago

i will +1 his love for the 11" MacBook Air ... people are always skeptical that i can do pretty much all of my work on it (yes, even some coding), but after almost two years, i still haven't found its small size to be too limiting.

activepeanut 14y ago
Has the small size affected your vision? I've briefly tried working on a small screen with high DPI and it really hurt my eyes. Maybe I'm getting old-man's eyes. ;)
- stock_toaster 14y ago
  Same here. I currently have an older (mid 2009) 15" mbp. Wondering if I can get by on a 13" though...
  - petercooper 14y ago
    If you get a new 13" Retina MBP, you'll have the best of all worlds. If you need a lower res, you got it. If you need a higher res, you got it. I hadn't anticipated this but since every resolution looks excellent on a retina display, I'm switching quite often for different tasks.
    - stock_toaster 14y ago
      Thanks for the anecdote. I will indeed check out the 13" retina.
- josephlord 14y ago
  High DPI should be better for your eyes and easier to read as the jaggies will be less visible. This does assume that you keep sizes the same and just put more pixels into every element.
tesseractive 14y ago
I had a netbook that size. I liked everything about the form factor, it was just cripplingly slow.

mturmon 14y ago

He plants a couple of nice flags: "This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary." and "In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work."

mmariani 14y ago
These are the points that most held my attention. I think too we're going in the wrong direction breaking up things and stitching them up again with technologies that weren't made for that. Although I think this strategy fits well the planned obsolescence policies we have widely deployed in the tech industry nowadays.
- prunebeads 14y ago
  That's interesting, but what would be the alternative? Rob Pike's dream setup "is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world. The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours." In this situation, there would be public phones, public computers available in sufficient quantity everywhere. Think of the necessary amount of work to install, maintain, and upgrade such a setup. In a capitalist society, there would be different brands providing access to their own solutions, and thus a lot of Blackberry, Apple, or <your favorite carrier> kiosks all over the place. You could think that with such a scheme, costs would prohibit a rapid evolution of services, as we witness them in current business models. Would we get the iKiosks updated each year with new firmware, or the latest multitouch screens? In comparison, how much money is being poured by individuals in upgrades for their personal stuff? What is the overall cost (i.e. money that could be spent on something else). There's the real estate issue also. How much space would be consumed by those kiosks, and how much would it cost? It would be interesting to estimate all the pros and cons of that dream setup, and compare it with our current situation.

Andrex 14y ago

I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that. Interesting that someone so steeped in the "old ways" of Unix dumb terminals is also, seemingly, such a good matchup for the "far future" vision of Chrome OS. What's old is new again?

n8agrin 14y ago
What's old is always new, especially on the Internet. I'm constantly reminded of the "Simpsons' did it" South Park episode whenever I'm reading press briefs about new startups.
acuozzo 14y ago
Rob Pike was one of the earliest advocates __against__ the use of traditional "dumb" terminals (including the "smart" ones, e.g., DEC's VT-100+ line). Early on, he developed Blit and brought the mouse to Unix. Later, he helped develop Plan 9, an operating system that's far more advanced (in some respects) than what we have today. He is not and has never been "steeped in the 'old ways'".

batgaijin 14y ago

I always wonder, how do people like this justify their level of trust for cloud providers and the government? It's as if a majority of the hardcore hackers have gone "Fuck it, I'm being watched anyway, they might as well be backing up my stuff as well." Are we past the point of it being a topic of debate except by people like me who have the illusion of choice?

Uhhrrr 14y ago
Well, he does work for a cloud provider. Also, he might just have a lot of faith in encryption (although he doesn't mention it).
- Evbn 14y ago
  Encryption? In the cloud? Only if you deploy your own app stack.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Encrypt locally, push to the cloud. See: Tarsnap.

damian2000 14y ago

His dream setup: "... carry a computer screen around, as long as it rolled up and fit inside something the size of a pen and had touch input when unrolled. As long as it had no local storage." How last century. I thought he would have at least suggested a hologram projection screen combined with some bio implants. ;-)

mdonahoe 14y ago

If you haven't seen acme in action, it is pretty crazy and interesting. Basically it makes heavy use of the mouse, and any typed word can be invoked like a command. Here is a tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M

wyclif 14y ago
The mousing is what lost me. I love vim because you don't have to deal with the mouse at all.
- jff 14y ago
  The mousing is what adds a crazy amount of power. You end up with dozens of files on screen, some showing text, some just displayed as the "tag" line. You use the mouse to rapidly jump around them, select text from one, paste into another, etc. The mouse is a pointing device, why not use it to point at things? If I have 3 columns in my acme window (which I usually do) and I'm working in the 3rd file down in the left-most column, it's faster to get to the top file in the right-most column by just grabbing the mouse and clicking than by futzing with key combos.
  - wyclif 14y ago
    You make a good case for acme; I'd be willing to try it. But I'm not convinced that in any context grabbing the mouse (with or without chording) is faster than keying, esp. since in vim many of the most important navigational keys are on the home row.
    - jff 14y ago
      You really need to try it, if nothing else it will broaden your experience so you can compare vi vs. emacs vs. acme. Myself, I watch vim users spend so much time just trying to get their cursors to the appropriate part of the file/line, and then select the appropriate text, that I scratch my head--this is faster? By the time you've figured out that typing "/whatev" should be sufficient to get you to the point you want, I could have grabbed the mouse, simply pointed it to the location I'm interested, and had my hands back on the keyboard already. Don't get me wrong, I also use vi a lot because it's very convenient and very powerful, but there are some things I'm much happier with in Acme.

notJim 14y ago

Some very interesting stuff here. Everyone should look at this screencast about the acme text editor: http://research.swtch.com/acme http://research.swtch.com/acme. This thing is wild and crazy in a way that's totally unexpected. I have no idea if the ideas are actually good, but they sure are different.

fra 14y ago

"The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that." It exists! It's called a sunray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

maxerickson 14y ago
Does Sun Ray make a phone? Of course I'm not serious, but the Sunray is one stack of technology that offers stateful session management, not a system for using the same computing environment on whatever hardware you happen to have at hand.
- fra 14y ago
  Touche, but they make a desktop client (oracle virtual desktop) and even an ipad app. Pretty good, but I agree it isn't yet enough.

andrewflnr 14y ago

I can't get behind the idea of every computer I interact with being a dumb terminal. I don't want to assume I'll always have a connection to the mother machine. Even in some ideal world where I always have a high speed connection that never fails, can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down? Not really. I would like to see a nice balance: I basically work locally, and anything I do is synced ASAP to "the cloud" and thence to other devices (and other people). But if I'm in the hills or the server goes down, hey, I still have a perfectly good computer in my pocket.

AngryParsley 14y ago
I agree. In addition to the concerns you brought up, I see other issues with Pike's proposal. If computers are infrastructure, I'm forced to deal with whatever computers others have. This is a problem, because most people don't use computers as much as me and aren't willing to spend as much on them. I'd rather carry a maxed-out 11" Air everywhere than put up with my friends' and relatives' computers. (In fact, I do this.) Pike doesn't address security either. Would you log into Gmail on a public computer? Would you enter your credit card info or visit your bank's website? I sure wouldn't. Phones from 20 years ago didn't have any storage or computational abilities, so these security concerns didn't exist for them. While I'm a huge fan of cloud-based storage and synchronization, there are just too many issues with using untrusted computers everywhere I go. Maybe it was due to the interview format, but I'm surprised such an intelligent, technical thinker managed to avoid discussing the downsides of his proposal.
- rojoca 14y ago
  Don't forget that this is Pike's ideal setup. Presumably in this "ideal" the security issues no longer exist and my "setup" is available at any interface I interact with - instantly.
- lazyjones 14y ago
  As you noticed yourself, the "dumber" the devices are, the more secure they will be. I'd happily log on to my e-mail account from a device that (I knew) booted an OS image from ROM just before I used it (comparable to those live CD-ROMs for secure applications like e-banking). Let's go back to burning ROMs for OS upgrades instead of flashing/storing them on disk! People can replace batteries, so they shouldn't have trouble replacing an OS ROM ..

epaga 14y ago

Slight critique here - I feel like he's using this to push an agenda rather than just telling us in detail what tools and software he uses to get his job done. He mentions a few things but in far less detail than anyone else I've read on usesthis. Instead he gives paragraph after paragraph of "world view" about moving things to the cloud...interesting, yes, but not what I'm after when I read usesthis posts... :-/

waferbaby 14y ago
Aw, sorry about that. I guess it's a nice break from the normality, maybe? :)
- statictype 14y ago
  I liked it. It's nice to see a guy's thoughts on how he thinks computing should be. Especially if its someone like Rob Pike. (Better than the usual stream of Macbook-Pro-with-24"-Cinema-Display which is what everyone seems to be using)
  - waferbaby 14y ago
    Yup! Agreed.
  - jff 14y ago
    Macbook Pro, vim, and git. Honestly, when there's a discussion of people's work setup on HN, that's kind of what I assume it's going to be.
    - nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
      Don't forget about those crazy people that use emacs instead of vim...
      - acuozzo 14y ago
        Also, don't forget about those even crazier people (e.g., myself) who prefer a more traditional vi (e.g., nvi) to vim.

codewright 14y ago

A surprisingly ideological interview. Combined with my run-ins with the go-nuts, I have to imagine there's some sort of general cultural coding cohort I've not fully understood yet. This intersection between an obsession with minimalism of a particular sort and dispossession is unknown to me. Seems common to the Go programmers I talk to.

cokernel_hacker 14y ago
My general take from observing their culture is dogmatic vs pragmatic. plan9 and go are dogmatic, they exist because the status quo is bad and something must be done. This is not to say their ideas are bad! Some of them are great but many of the great ones are brought into the mainstream thru unix (procfs, utf-8) and C (unnamed substructures) :) I just wished they focused on making the mainstream better instead of this more indirect route...
- p9idf 14y ago
  >[Plan 9 exists] because the status quo is bad and something must be done. That's a strange way to describe research and experimentation (though not strictly incorrect). >I just wished they focused on making the mainstream better Plan 9 predates all of today's mainstream operating systems.
  - cokernel_hacker 14y ago
    > That's a strange way to describe research and experimentation (though not strictly incorrect). Many of the modern OS research papers that I have read take an existing solution and mess with it. As an example, many file system papers take ext[34] or btrfs and do something to them (if we want to debate this statement, we can). I see this with replacement algorithms, packet schedulers, etc. Much experimentation happens but it is usually in the context of Linux or FreeBSD or some other popular existing solution these days. There are papers that buck this more conventional approach like barrelfish and singularity and exokernels and L4 etc. etc. etc. I do not think they are the status quo and I am/was not saying that plan9 is a bad thing, let me be clear on that. >Plan 9 predates all of today's mainstream operating systems. This is said with enough certainty without being true that I am allergic to it. All? Plan 9 started in the late 80's [1] OS X/iOS is a mach derivative which is circa 1985. The NT OS/2 project which begat modern Windows was started in 1988. BSD? All descendants of BSD which first released in 1977. Rob Pike complains about BSD's "cat -v" in the early 80's. Maybe you are using "predate" with a different connotation but I don't know which. At the very best* it co-existed with the others. [1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html

kaptain 14y ago

Rob Pike doesn't want a dumb terminal. He wants a powerful new infrastructure. My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world. I can relate to what he wants: he cares about his data, not about what his data is on. Every time I upgrade machines or move to a different machine, I have to either reconstruct my environment or I have to tolerate an absence of some data that would be nice to have. How amazing would it be if I can could use any 'terminal' anywhere and have complete access to all of my personal data without having to tote around a physical piece of hardware that's 'mine'. Any geek's 'bat-cave' is testament to this need: a Mac Plus sitting underneath a table next to Commodore 64. On top of the table lays a 486 DX/2 PC with Super VGA and a Soundblaster compatible card decaying inside. Everywhere strings of SCSI, RS-232, Ethernet spaghetti encircle cases of floppies (both 5.25 and 3.5). Where's the data? Anything precious has made it's way through different formats to whatever you're on now. Everything else is slowly rotting away. Outsourcing the batcave to this ubiquitous seems much more appetizing to me. Plus it leaves me room for my 1st and 2nd gen Transformer collection.

mrpollo 14y ago

"The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere." Reminds me of the mini glass that Tony Stark is carrying with him all around the 2nd Iron Man movie, see here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9694286/iron-man-computer.jpeg https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9694286/iron-man-computer.jpeg In the movie Tony (Iron Man) can control the infrastructure around him with this device, just like Rob Pike described.

wowoc 14y ago

All these esteemed people must be such individualists. They all use Macs.

waferbaby 14y ago
Hah! Not all :) http://usesthis.com/interviews/windows http://usesthis.com/interviews/windows http://usesthis.com/interviews/linux http://usesthis.com/interviews/linux
jfb 14y ago
Because the only reason to use a Mac is to fit in by being cool, of course.
frou_dh 14y ago
Are you saying that individualism in this game is more about what is incidentally used than what is created with it?

meaty 14y ago

At the risk of causing a flamewar, it sounds like he wants Microsoft surface. It has all of those attributes when backed by SkyDrive apart from the fact you can't roll it up.

acuozzo 14y ago
Can you go to any other Microsoft Surface and see exactly what you saw on your own, including (but not limited to) your programs, data, and configuration/profile? Also, will the state of that other Microsoft Surface be exactly what yours was when you left it? That is, will your browser window located at (314, 159) with 6 tabs open and an HN post written in tab #2 appear on this other Microsoft Surface exactly as you left it on your own? If not, then the Microsoft Surface may not fit the bill. This is what you get with Plan 9 and a shared file server.
- meaty 14y ago
  Not entirely but 90% of it. Your programs, data and profile will move around and be cached if you sign in with a Live account. Some application state may be persisted differently but when you sign in to another PC, it'll all move across slowly. plan9 doesn't do what he wants either. You can't detach a window station from the 9p network and take it and all your data with you. Communication networks aren't reliable enough to maintain a 9p connection either. At least surface handles this... Hell RDP'ing into the office is the same as what he wants...

nnq 14y ago

The whole "everything in the cloud", "let someone else worry about storage" view, at least the way he promotes them, are more like VCS than let's say Git (or pick another DVCS)... you have a conceptual "central" point of failure, even if this "point" is a network of servers distributed around the world. I want STORAGE ON EVERY DEVICE (not volatile!), and and automatic system to sync it with all my other devices, WITHOUT NEEDING THE CLOUD, just set up and ad-hoc mesh network and sync everyth (yeah, there's gonna be smth like "merges" for OS settings and music collection changes but I can do with that). The "cloud" should be just infrastructure, nothing else added, and I shouldn't be distrupted when my connection to it fails... "Always connected"? No, no, no, I'll always want to be able to work offline and be able to sync/merge/push/pull even my OS, its settings and software (and be able to "branch" my and keep multiple versions of software and all that). DVCS should be the models for how to do everything in the cloud, with simpler interfaces for different level of user needs/competency. Rob Pike's ideal of "homogeneity" in computing really misses the distinction between distributed and central syncing, the security and reliability implications etc. ...and large local storage capacity and "enough" computing power on all devices is needed for this. I'd rather be "part of the mesh" than "connected to the cloud mesh", because I think the distinctions are important and they require different things from "client devices" (all devices should be "clients"! no servers "in the cloud" for me please!)

justincormack 14y ago
That is the CouchDB model. It is very appealing...
- nnq 14y ago
  in a narrow sense... yet I've always wondered why people don't choose the master-master model of doing things more often...
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    Because it's hard to do, and even harder to do right. You at least need immutable data and versioning, and you still have to do something about conflicts.

buro9 14y ago

> When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that. For me, Dropbox has brought me that. I still use Github and the like, but my computers now share such a similar setup (all Linux, install Go, install Dropbox, install Sublime Text 2, done) that I can walk out of the office without doing anything special to my machine, go home and pick up literally where I left off. My git repositories are cloned into my Dropbox folders so that when I move from one place to another but am not ready to check in (local branch in state of flux) I still have that in multiple locations. As Sublime Text 2 stores the project and file info in a plain text file, that state comes with me too. My $GOROOT is also in my Dropbox folder, so if I've grabbed something via "go get" that also follows me around. I view Dropbox as an ever present working cache, not as storage. Things like documents are in Google Drive and accessed via the browser. On Friday I went to a meeting at 3pm that I thought would just be 20 minutes. It turned out that it took 3 hours, and I hadn't closed ST2 or anything I was working on... no problem, I went home instead of back to the office and my work was exactly where I left off with the same files open in ST2. I think the only thing that doesn't follow with me are the undo buffers in ST2.

minikomi 14y ago
Woah. I'm plopping my vim, zsh, tmux & go stuff in there tonight & symlinking where appropriate. Thanks!
jlouis 14y ago
There is an important difference though. You are sharing your data, but you are not sharing your programs and their current setup. That is, if you forget to save your file, it won't be on Dropbox. Plan9 is way more persistent here, as it has a lot of tools which can be brought back to the state you left them in on one machine. It is awfully nice to have a persistent environment. Dropbox is definitely partway towards that goal, but it doesn't hammer in the nail fully.
- p9idf 14y ago
  If you forget to save your file, it won't be on your Plan 9 file server either. The only program which has the state persistence you describe is acme which can dump its state to a file and load it again later, but most every editor on every operating system can do that. And you have to run the Dump command manually, so if you forget, you lose your state the same as you would if you forgot to save before unplugging your terminal.

mseepgood 14y ago

I like how his photo matches the colors of the blog design (pink & grey), obviously on purpose. This tells me that he pays attention to detail. Not every Unix hacker would change his clothes for some random interview on the web.

sturadnidge 14y ago

I don't think his phone system analogy is correct. Yes, you can pick up any phone and make a call, but you can't receive a call to 'your' number from any phone. i.e. there is still state associated with the phone network, and landlines are not portable in the same sense that mobiles and laptops are.

fafner 14y ago

I'm a bit surprised that he is happy with a Mac Book. His editor acme requires three mouse buttons and Apple is designed for one mouse button use. Does he use an external mouse all the time? And I'm a bit disappointed that he's not using Plan9. With the current ease of VMs there are no driver and installation issues and he could move the snapshot around.

aes256 14y ago
Surely he can use gestures instead of physical buttons? Certainly gestures make the difference between one and two button trackpads a non-issue — if anything, I find it easier and more natural than reaching for a separate button — and it can't be too difficult to scale this to three buttons.
- enneff 14y ago
  Mouse clicks in acme usually accompany precise cursor positioning, so I don't think gestures would work well.
jlouis 14y ago
You can use acme with a MacBook. First of all Cmd-x, Cmd-c and Cmd-v works. Second, Cmd and Option with the mousepad gives you clicks on buttons 2 and 3. Still I prefer to have a mouse when I am working on larger texts because it is so much easier to do text rearrangement with a mouse. A correctly set up acme on a mac is surprisingly effective.
- EdwardCoffin 14y ago
  You answered most of the question I came here to ask. How about chording though? I'm under the impression that there are actions that are triggered by all three mouse buttons simultaneously. I'm hoping to give acme a serious try (I have it installed), but I need to be sure I won't have to start using a three button mouse rather than whatever is provided by my system.
  - 14y ago

cturner 14y ago

I like the no-local-storage dream. But what about when you're at the airport or the hotel network is broken or on holiday in indochina, and want to do some hacking? There's probably no network, or if there is it'll be expensive, slow and unreliable. Though I struggle with git, I love it that you can easily keep a tree pulled (even if you don't actively use it), and use that when you need it.

nicholassmith 14y ago

I like his ideal, all the work being accessible no matter what device you've got in front of you but the whole idea only works with ubiquitous network connectivity. I commute a couple of hours most days through areas where the 3G quality is non-existant to poor, occasionally reaching 'Usable', so I'd be doomed to being unproductive. Caching gets you so far, but there's still plenty of rough spots to the idea. It's definitely a nice idea though, maybe some day it'll happen. Nice to see Rob Pike getting a usesthis.com post, slightly (but not much) surprised to see him using Macs as his primary choice.

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lazyjones 14y ago

Some of us do not like the cloud as much as Rob Pike because we are worried about censorship and corporate misconduct (what do you do if your stuff is suddenly gone one day?). The "always accessible" and "continue where you left" paradigmata we can still relate to though: I've been using screen in ssh / putty windows for almost 20 years now, I used VNC for some time (even wrote a 16 bit client for DOS that ran off a floppy disk and with 2MB RAM...) for the same purpose. Something like VNC but with a "responsive" UI that adapts to the device currently used (tablet, laptop, desktop) while still retaining all the state needed for the user to continue where he left, that'd be something novel and useful after all these years.

Millennium 14y ago

Count me in as another "synchronized local storage" person, for the typical two reasons: I don't want to rely on a connection to the cloud, and I don't want to have to trust the cloud storage providers.

aperture 14y ago

I think it was a good post overall, but what got to me was his lack of doing anything about his issues. When Mr. Pike wanted a revolutionary OS, plan9 was created. When Mr. Pike wanted a language fixing problems dealt with in C, Go was created. When it comes to a machine that's roll-able without persistent local storage, he merely wishes for it to be a reality? I can understand if, through working with Google, the only research in that area is tied to the Chromebook, but still. He certainly has the capability to cause influence (First link on hn), but he's not getting into the core of the problem. I love this guy just as much as the rest of the community, but I find it puzzling steps aren't already being taken to make this next dream of his a reality. I also agree that cloud is not the answer for everything, so it would be enlightening for a new tablet-esque roll able device to be made that swims against the general Mac-inspired cloud tablet trend. But if Rob Pike isn't going to make it a reality, I doubt someone else will release it in his vision or to his liking. Perhaps he has a few ideas or tricks to make things "just work". And that's what I'd look forward to.

tree_of_item 14y ago
The 9p protocol addresses a lot of the network activity described in the article, but I'm not sure what Rob Pike could do to make the hardware he describes a reality. All the examples you gave were software.
- pi18n 14y ago
  Surely Rob Pike could get funding to start a hardware company, especially if the aim is going to be low powered devices connecting to cloud services?

shadowmint 14y ago

I clicked the link seeing the high point count and thinking I might find some gems of productivity I could pull into my own daily routine, but instead I found some discussion of clouds and terminals and other things that are philosophically interesting but tangibly well argued and discussed ad nauseam. Of course, the article is tiny and talks abstractly about something that everyone has an opinion on, so of course it has up lots of votes. I am disappoint.

dschiptsov 14y ago

ACME screencast is definitely worth looking. It is the "everything is text [streams]" and GUI concepts together in action.

ninjin 14y ago
I have to say, it is an amazing concept and very tempting, especially the way you create links in unstructured text. The only reason I am not trying it out right now is that it would require an X-server wherever I go in order to do proper editing and my current tmux set-up wouldn't work.

pi18n 14y ago

I've wondered for a while now, why isn't Plan 9 rising along with cloud computing? It seems like it would mesh very well with having many computers connected in a network, and might make tasks like massively distributed map/reduce more accessible.

mhd 14y ago
What part would you be interested in? Pretty much everything that Plan 9 has is available in some kind of fashion for other operating systems, often in a more specialized manner. And by the time you hack the performance and compatibility into Plan 9's kernel and drivers (if its minimalism would allow it), you could port/re-implement most of what you'd be missing. The main part that made this distributed nature possible was 9P, a network protocol/file system. And distributed file systems are a dime a dozen now. Hadoop, S3, GFS, GlusterFS are all vital elements of "the cloud", never mind old staples like NFS, AFS etc. For "cloud needs", they're better suited (fault tolerance, performance…). The big thing about Plan 9 (and Bell Laps software in general) wasn't its novelty, but its scope, narrowing down everything in a typical network environment down to a few protocols, APIs and GUIs. Not really all that applicable for serving bits to browsers. Never mind the bandwidth. Plan 9 was mostly text in a LAN.

prunebeads 14y ago

Personally, I switched to a tiled WM because I didn't want to go back and forth between keyboard and mouse all the time. I want an editor which I can handle using keyboard alone, and only use the mouse when I really have to (web, drawing, games - perhaps I should use a trackball). Acme relies too much on the mouse for me, but I like the idea a lot. There's another couple of issues: syntax highlighting, large scale refactoring (which is not easy either with vi or emacs atm). However, once you get accustomed to a certain workflow, it becomes difficult to accept something new. Maybe I should give it a shot.

4ad 14y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by large scale refactoring, but refactoring is much easier in acme compared to any editor I used before because of the powerful sam command language[1] and structural regular expressions[2]. [1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/sam/sam.pdf http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/sam/sam.pdf [2] http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf
- prunebeads 14y ago
  I mean for instance changing the name of a value across multiple files, or fixing calls of a function whose prototype had been modified. That sort of things. There are other services that an IDE can provide: - name completion - list of variables in current scope - list of visible types - access to documentation - code annotation All these could be implemented in external tools, but how snappy would the interface be? The filter paradigm of Unix is great for batch processing, but fails when used interactively, unless processi are lightened to the point of becoming almost like threads within the same process, and with the matching communication speed (inter process communication using pipes isn't really that fast compared to shared memory). That said, maybe large scale programs are the problem to begin with. With simple, one task focused programs, source code becomes easy to maintain without resorting to the services I listed above. It's not easy to get rid of them though (consider compilers for instance).
  - 14y ago

programminggeek 14y ago

Using ssh, screen, and a prgmr instance, I can access my stuff and have the same state for almost all of my dev work anywhere I can use a chrome browser with the ssh plugin or any ssh terminal app. That is pretty close to what he's talking about I suppose. As of now my iphone, ipad, and laptop can all jump on my little instance and I'm good to go. That being said, I don't think going 100% cloud is for everybody yet, but we're getting closer.

jff 14y ago
Using ssh and screen gives you a 1975 interface to the computer. You've just made your own dumb terminal, doing EVERYTHING on the remote system except printing out a stream of characters to the local screen. It's not even as smart as the Blit that Rob Pike designed in 1982; at least that had the capability to fetch configuration from the server to set itself up.

fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago

I dream of Rob's dream setup as well. I suspect many people do. But I hope it shouldn't be too hard to make it a reality. A smart phone which is always connected to remote storage (the cost could be a problem here?), and how about an electronic paper keyboard which rolls up to the size of a pen, that's somehow attached to or part of the phone. Sit down somewhere, connect, unroll the keyboard, and there is your computing environment.

awakeasleep 14y ago

My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don't have to carry at least three computers - laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments - around with me in order to function in the modern world. The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours. Wow that sounds like a dream!

njharman 14y ago

Dude has style!

stcredzero 14y ago

> What would be your dream setup? I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. This is exactly my idea of changing from our current memory hierarchy to take advantage of the new SSD and cloud capabilities we have now: "Fat Cache." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544522

peterwwillis 14y ago

Payphones are annoying. It might be broken, or have gum jammed in it, or someone might be using it, or you have to track one down, and you have to be sitting at it to receive a call. Cellphones are in your pocket, come with your personal phone directory, are cheaper per minute, and you don't have to stand still to use them. I'm really surprised that Rob thinks people would want to deal with a computer-as-payphone model. And wireless data networks suck ass in North America. His ideal world is probably at least 20 years away. On the other hand, I love thin terminals. Screw local stateless networked computation. Give me a snappy remote interface to a beefy terminal server and i'm happy. That's an interface you literally can pick back up at any time with no performance cost due to being far away from the data.

car54whereareu 14y ago

Rob also uses tinted glasses and that shirt. I doubt the awesome bits of plan9 that he compared to a telephone (pay phone) can be replicated by a higher level service like amazon/google cloud something, git or some other dvcs. 9p is a protocol after all. He also mentioned doing computing somewhere else, and not just storing data in the cloud. So please tell me I just need to configure git differently or sign up for amazons newest whatever. This seems relevant as well http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/ http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/

wwkeyboard 14y ago

Maybe we can ask him what its like to be coding at 50? For a serious question, does acme lend itself to a chording keyboard? It seems like this is taking another step towards Engelbert's vision in the mother of all demos.

seacond 14y ago

Many of the things he says I agree with, others I don't. I think that's the thing with computing. Everyone's tastes are at least slightly different. We don't all want exactly the same things. I think the big failure is programmers' inability to bring these desired advances, like what Plan 9 achieved, to a wider audience. I mean, he says he had this wondwerful environment at Bell Labs, but almost no one outside of Bell Labs gets to experience that pleasure. Why not? They open sourced it too late? I'm not sure I buy that. It's still better than UNIX, so what's changed? It's like there's some assumption that people just don't deserve anything better, and there's no point in working towards it. Except if you're at Bell Labs. We're stuck with old UNIX, with all of its historical cruft. Like him, I've just learned to cope with it. (It's funny he's complaining about argv limits (see 2004 Slashdot interview). That seems to suggest he likes to compose super long argv's. No? Maybe he does not like xargs? I never did. But then I've seen similarly unexplainable limits in the Plan 9 port to UNIX. Why can't I have a Plan 9 sed command file with a very large number of commands?) We could certainly have better. Perhaps it's simply a matter of getting behind the right projects, instead of just following the money and being lazy... working at Google and buying MacBook Pros. That's sort of like giving up. Complacency. Honestly, "grep'ing the web" just doesn't sound all that "amazing" to me. I don't care how many servers they have running, Google is not Bell Labs.

16s 14y ago

I'm hesitant to move to the cloud until privacy issues are fundamentally addressed. All these vendors pouring over user data is not in our interest. I think it will take laws and government action to stop this sort of privacy invasion. Until that happens, I'll keep my local storage.