{"id":11007,"date":"2022-12-11T13:14:04","date_gmt":"2022-12-11T18:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11007"},"modified":"2022-12-11T13:14:04","modified_gmt":"2022-12-11T18:14:04","slug":"plan-9-if-its-not-broke-dont-fix-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11007","title":{"rendered":"Plan 9: If It’s Not Broke, Don’t Fix It"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just came across an interesting article that appears to be from Francesco Nidito\u2014although I\u2019m not sure about the provenance\u2014concerning the Plan 9 operating system. The gist of the post was that Plan 9 was a brilliant piece of software but that it didn\u2019t solve any real problems<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The most salient example of this was Plan 9\u2019s fulfillment of the Unix promise that everything is a file. Unix broke that promise as soon as networking was introduced and the socket interface was implemented. Plan 9 provided a much more Unix-like networking interface that made networking connections look like files. The problem, according to the post, was that no one considered the socket interface a problem. Most users didn\u2019t consider Unix broken in any significant way.<\/p>\n

I have a couple of problems with the post. The first is the assertion that Plan 9 failed because AT&T didn\u2019t have any experience in selling software. That was true\u2014perhaps even more true\u2014when Unix was introduced, yet Unix survived and thrived. It had all the same problems concerning incompatibility and the need to reprogram existing applications that Plan 9 had yet was successful.<\/p>\n

Far from never hearing about it, I actually had a running Plan 9 instance and contra the article it had at least two excellent code editors, Acme and Sam. What it did lack and what I consider its fatal failure\u2014and my second problem with the post\u2014was its lack of a Web browser. If it had had one, Plan 9, like Linux, could have gained traction in the nerd community and leveraged that to more a general acceptance. Being able to browse the web is the sine qua non<\/i> for any workstation OS these days so Plan 9 was going nowhere without one. Oddly, the Plan 9 faithful never considered this a problem worth solving and as a result Plan 9 lives on mainly as Plan 9 From User Space<\/a>, a port of many of Plan 9\u2019s tools and libraries to other operating systems.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too bad. Plan 9 was<\/i> a better Unix and it\u2019s program from anywhere paradigm was a powerful and compelling feature. It\u2019s too bad it didn\u2019t succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just came across an interesting article that appears to be from Francesco Nidito\u2014although I\u2019m not sure about the provenance\u2014concerning the Plan 9 operating system. The gist of the post was that Plan 9 was a brilliant piece of software … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-11007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11007"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11008,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11007\/revisions\/11008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}