Because worse is better.
Or because good enough is good enough.
Or Avoiding success at all costs...;)
Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
71–80 of 83 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about D?
That's a good question. D has been around for quite some time, has some well-known names (Bright, Alexandrescu), but has yet to break big. Compared to it, Go, a much more recent development, tends to do quite well (just my estimates, PL mindshare is a bit hard to measure). I think it's mostly because of some internal and positioning issues. I haven't been following it recently, but I remember some problems with diffe…
Although D has been around for longer, it's worth out that the Go amd64 (aka x64) compiler is the most mature compiler in the Go compiler suite (ARM, x86, amd64) but AFAIK the D compiler is only available for 32-bit x86.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has only been out since November 2009, and it wasn't considered ready for production then. Maybe it is now, but it definitely hasn't had much time to be establish a large user base.
Go is in a "public beta" status, i.e. what you see right now is its development, not its refinement. It basically hasn't reached a 1.0 release version yet. Participants of the mailing list are very early adopters who write some libraries for it. It's still likely enough that important parts of the language spec will change in non-compatible ways, and especially the standard library still isn't too stable (e.g. the ht…
There is also the Rust programming language being developed by Graydon Hoare(the Mozilla Tracemonkey compiler dude), Brendan Eich (the Javascript creator) and Dave Herman (of PLT Scheme - Racket ?)
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4009
From the language faq : http://wiki.github.com/graydon/rust/language-faq
"Have you seen this Google language, Go? How does Rust compare?
Yes.
Rust development was several years underway before Go launched, no direct inspiration.
Though Pike’s previous languages in the Go family (Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo) were
influential, Go adopted semantics (safety and memory model) that are quite unsatisfactory.
Shared mutable state.
Global GC.
Null pointers.
No RAII or destructors.
No type-parametric user code.
There are a number of other fine coroutine / actor languages in development presently.
It’s an area of focus across the PL community."Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?
I think this is a hard question to answer without a solid definition of popular. That said, at our startup we use Go for all server side work and I wrote Go production code while still working for Google. In my little world it's very popular, the only other language we use is Javascript.
that's interesting - did you evaluate something like Node.js or Clojure/Aleph for the same purpose ?
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
#75One killer setup for Plan9 would be to package it up as a VM and distribute it. May be Amazon can pre-create some Plan9 EC2 images.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
#76IMO Plan 9 didn't gain critical mass because Unix is still "good enough". It's also very difficult to keep current with hardware drivers for a niche OS. However, there are some things that came from Plan 9 that are very much mainstream, the most notable being UTF-8 which was invented by Ken Thompson and first implemented on Plan 9. Linux's clone(2) system call is obviously inspired by Plan 9's rfork. And one could ar…
Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?
If anyone wants to have a go with Go you can now play with it in your browser: http://golang.org/
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
#77I've been a Plan9 user/dev since 2000. Have been to two of the IWP9 conferences - sadly I won't be going to Seattle for the 5th unless I score some big cash in the next few weeks - http://iwp9.quanstro.net/ * Licensing - Plan9 wasn't open when open was the in thing. * No web browser - just as the web became a big thing, no web browser is a deathtrap. * The gap is too great a leap - until the recent LinuxEMU almost NO…
What are you able to use Plan9 for on a daily basis, out of curiosity?
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be did a couple of things that prevented BeOS from going anywhere. One was basing the machine on PPC processors initially, because it limited their audience. I thought it was a cool idea, but wasn't willing to buy outdated hardware to get the OS. Mac users at the time could have simply acquired the OS and installed it, but the number of mac users willing to do that wouldn't ever be large. One was not supporting IDE w…
Be definitely wasted a lot of time in strategic churn, porting from Hobbit to PowerPC, BeBox to Mac, PowerPC to x86, PCs to thin clients, etc. For the brief time that BeOS ran on Macs, the likely goal was not to get Mac users to switch to BeOS but to convince Apple to buy Be. I heard that Apple offered $75M for Be and JLG refused. (Some people assume that Apple offered the same amount for Be and NeXT, but that's pret…
Oops. I lost track of product names frequently, especially since there are so many ;)
You're probably also right about the reason for starting out with a PPC based system. I'd heard about a similarly sized offer for Be, as well as JLG's refusal.
There weren't a lot of realtime OS's out there, and still aren't -- BeOS could have been the next OS/2, only without IBM's marketing behind it. (Can anyone say, "Friendly fire?")
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
#79I've been a Plan9 user/dev since 2000. Have been to two of the IWP9 conferences - sadly I won't be going to Seattle for the 5th unless I score some big cash in the next few weeks - http://iwp9.quanstro.net/ * Licensing - Plan9 wasn't open when open was the in thing. * No web browser - just as the web became a big thing, no web browser is a deathtrap. * The gap is too great a leap - until the recent LinuxEMU almost NO…
What are you able to use Plan9 for on a daily basis, out of curiosity?
My normal work - programming. Linux / BSD have a 9p servers so one can mount them in Plan 9. The environment is so much nicer both in looks and operation.
Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has only been out since November 2009, and it wasn't considered ready for production then. Maybe it is now, but it definitely hasn't had much time to be establish a large user base.
Go is in a "public beta" status, i.e. what you see right now is its development, not its refinement. It basically hasn't reached a 1.0 release version yet. Participants of the mailing list are very early adopters who write some libraries for it. It's still likely enough that important parts of the language spec will change in non-compatible ways, and especially the standard library still isn't too stable (e.g. the ht…
Go is picking up traction with Real Companies doing Real Things. I can say that it's now being taken seriously within Google, and is being used for some production services there.
I've also been in correspondence with one group at another company who have written close over 50k lines of Go code for their storage infrastructure. They're very happy with it. (Just rooting for a better garbage collector; it's coming.)
Despite its familiar appearance, Go represents a different approach to programming in general. One that I find personally refreshing, and it seems to be catching on.