4 ms·

You're perplexed? Imagine how Thompson and Ritchie feel after improving unix with Plan 9, and everyone stays stuck with unix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan

• krakensden 17y ago
  Union filesystems are common in Linux systems, and basically every modern "Unix" (Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, Linux...) supports /proc. A lot of the other 'absolutely everything is a file' stuff is cute, but not having it isn't so terrible. Some people seem to like the text editor, but some people like nedit- there's no accounting for taste. Seriously, it's easy to be angry, but what do you miss from Plan 9 specifically? Why?
  • 10ren 17y ago
    Tone is hard to convey online. I guess I should have added a smiley. I'm not angry at all; I don't miss anything from Plan 9. I just feel sorry for these guys who went to so much trouble to make a "proper" OS that fixed up one they hacked together (unix).
    • 10ren 17y ago
      [10 days pass...] I wonder if unix beat Plan 9 because it was established in the market (certainly a huge factor), or if its hacked together approach was somehow intrinsically better (as in the "worse is better" essay); or maybe that there were some specific decisions in Plan 9 that were bad in practice (though they seemed good to the designers). I guess unix being established and being adaptable makes it very hard to displace - so the first factor swamps any effect of the other two.