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That's not a problem of the philosophy, it's a problem of its implementation. And that is caused by the myriad people and entities to have been responsible for

That's not a problem of the philosophy, it's a problem of its implementation. And that is caused by the myriad people and entities to have been responsible for the chaotic evolution of the various parts that make up modern Unix systems. Design by effectively nobody can be at least as bad as design by committee. As others pointed out, Plan 9 is much closer to a proper realization of the everything is a file design philosophy. Unsurprising, since it was grown entirely within Bell Labs under the supervision of the original Unix team. It's unfortunate it hasn't reached a point of being ready for mass adoption.

duaneb 13y ago
> As others pointed out, Plan 9 is much closer to a proper realization of the everything is a file design philosophy. Unsurprising, since it was grown entirely within Bell Labs under the supervision of the original Unix team. It's unfortunate it hasn't reached a point of being ready for mass adoption. I don't think it's unfortunate, having used it for a month straight I'm not convinced at all it's the right thing, and in fact, is exactly the opposite direction from where I think we should be going (as far away from the filesystem as possible).
- nknighthb 13y ago
  Because you have a technical argument, or because of the poor user experience that a research platform provides?
  - duaneb 13y ago
    My technical argument is that the filesystem is too complicated an abstraction for questionable benefit. Yes, sockets are really cool as files, but that's not any more useful outside of the unix shell. I suspect that Plan 9 could be a good dev environment, but is not a great deployment platform—it just doesn't offer enough better than developed *NIXes to port code over.
cmccabe 13y ago
Plan 9 was a great OS. And it did fix a lot of these problems (although I don't know if it fixed this particular one). But it turns out that what we have is good enough, and it never gained traction.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  I don't entirely agree with that characterization. I believe Plan 9 offers fundamental technical advantages that would interest a small but significant and sustainable population of users and developers, and that it's not the inertia of other platforms that it can't overcome, but itself. Its user experience is utter crap, a combination of poor/lack of design and annoying idiosyncrasies by certain of its developers. It's a research platform, and no real effort has been made to turn it into something more practical. If someone were to pick it up and turn it into something people wouldn't hate using, I think we'd see a community on par with NetBSD or OpenBSD.

duaneb 13y ago

> As others pointed out, Plan 9 is much closer to a proper realization of the everything is a file design philosophy. Unsurprising, since it was grown entirely within Bell Labs under the supervision of the original Unix team. It's unfortunate it hasn't reached a point of being ready for mass adoption. I don't think it's unfortunate, having used it for a month straight I'm not convinced at all it's the right thing, and in fact, is exactly the opposite direction from where I think we should be going (as far away from the filesystem as possible).

nknighthb 13y ago
Because you have a technical argument, or because of the poor user experience that a research platform provides?
- duaneb 13y ago
  My technical argument is that the filesystem is too complicated an abstraction for questionable benefit. Yes, sockets are really cool as files, but that's not any more useful outside of the unix shell. I suspect that Plan 9 could be a good dev environment, but is not a great deployment platform—it just doesn't offer enough better than developed *NIXes to port code over.

cmccabe 13y ago

Plan 9 was a great OS. And it did fix a lot of these problems (although I don't know if it fixed this particular one). But it turns out that what we have is good enough, and it never gained traction.

nknighthb 13y ago
I don't entirely agree with that characterization. I believe Plan 9 offers fundamental technical advantages that would interest a small but significant and sustainable population of users and developers, and that it's not the inertia of other platforms that it can't overcome, but itself. Its user experience is utter crap, a combination of poor/lack of design and annoying idiosyncrasies by certain of its developers. It's a research platform, and no real effort has been made to turn it into something more practical. If someone were to pick it up and turn it into something people wouldn't hate using, I think we'd see a community on par with NetBSD or OpenBSD.