Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Week with Plan 9

thedorkweb.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 126 posts

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#81

Post by rakoo »

flenserboy wrote: post #44
the_only_law wrote: post #32

The more I read about some of the operating systems eventually died out (mostly), the more disappointed I am that the only realistic options for workstation/server OS’s are Windows and a handful of Unix-like systems.

I would be very curious to see a list of features which were available in defunct OSes that are not available or only available via kludge these days. There are some great ideas still out there in the wild.

BFS (the BeOS File System) had very cool features, especially for the time (see https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-b...):

- 64-bit, journaled, UTF-8 capable, extended attributes: things that are standard today but novel at the time

- It had "live queries" meaning feeds into file changes. AFAIK only NTFS has that today with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal. Inotify is a hack: have you tried monitoring your root folder ?

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#83

Post by housel »

Technically wrote: post #4
jsolson wrote: post #2

It's not entirely abandoned. A few years ago Brad Fitzpatrick dropped by my desk because the latest Google Compute Engine virtualization stack rollout had broken Plan 9 on GCE. This was interfering with cutting a new Go release (the official releases ran on VMs running Plan 9). I don't remember the specific breakage, but that was the day we added Plan 9 to the stable of operating systems we run in our CI regression s…

I know that Russ Cox & Rob Pike both still use plan9.

Do we know what distribution they use?

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#84

Post by jolmg »

flenserboy wrote: post #44
the_only_law wrote: post #32

The more I read about some of the operating systems eventually died out (mostly), the more disappointed I am that the only realistic options for workstation/server OS’s are Windows and a handful of Unix-like systems.

I would be very curious to see a list of features which were available in defunct OSes that are not available or only available via kludge these days. There are some great ideas still out there in the wild.

I've heard wonders of Lisp OSes, but haven't tried one.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#85

Post by rbanffy »

butterisgood wrote: post #25
jsolson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly knew about the connections between Go (and so very much other stuff at Google) and Plan 9. I was surprised, at the time, to see the OS itself in use in a production role. Just another example of unexpected tools getting the job done.

Coraid produces ATA over Ethernet storage platforms shipping their own fork of Plan 9 on the devices. If I had a need for it, or could justify the cash, I'd get one just to play around!

I once almost bought a massive Xerox printer from a graphics shop that was decommissioning it. It had a Xerox Star (running some specialized software) for its brains.

In the end, the workstation was so completely fused to the printer I'd end with a car-sized workstation.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#86

Post by egypturnash »

simias wrote: post #79
jeromenerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people in the go team were indeed part of the plan9 team, Rob Pike and Russ Cox to mention a few. Iirc Russ Cox ported Plan9 userspace to Linux when he moved to google, somehow out of frustration. Thanks for that, using acme on Unix is like a hot summer late afternoon fresh beer. Or whatever fresh beverage of your fancy.

I like minimalist and sometimes esoteric dev environments but I must confess that I just don't get acme. I know that some people swear by it but it's hard for me not to think that it's the programming equivalent of listening to music on vinyls. For one thing it's extremely mouse-driven, which is already disqualifying in my book but to each their own. The whole "anything can be a tag and you can execute it by clicking…

"books are black on white and we read those just fine"

Now I wanna see a B&W syntax highlighting setup that uses all the tools available to a book. Font sizes, bold/italics, the use of display fonts here and there, including Comic Sans to highlight Really Bad Ideas...

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#87

Post by arexxbifs »

flenserboy wrote: post #44
the_only_law wrote: post #32

The more I read about some of the operating systems eventually died out (mostly), the more disappointed I am that the only realistic options for workstation/server OS’s are Windows and a handful of Unix-like systems.

I would be very curious to see a list of features which were available in defunct OSes that are not available or only available via kludge these days. There are some great ideas still out there in the wild.

AmigaOS had (well, has, but it's pretty much defunct) a lot of interesting things such as ARexx, DataTypes, Assigns and a standardized software installer.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#88

Post by aflag »

khm wrote: post #41
michaelhoffman wrote: post #22

> 9Front And Surprise Auschwitz What the actual fuck. At first I thought this was some joke in poor taste by the blog post, but in fact he is referring to the use of Nazi death camp imagery in the documentation. That's not cool.

Hi. I made that image. I was searching for 'rails documentation' and accidentally hit the 'Images' link. That photo was in the first page of results. Its presence was so absurd and out of place that I felt like I had to do something with it. It was made in an era before actual Nazis had re-entered the public dialogue, so it felt like Google Image Search was denigrating Ruby on Rails by including this sort of imagery…

If the other stuff that upsets people are of the same caliber, you should definitely take the time to remove them too.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#89

Post by yellowapple »

qwaladuk wrote: post #77
khm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. I made that image. I was searching for 'rails documentation' and accidentally hit the 'Images' link. That photo was in the first page of results. Its presence was so absurd and out of place that I felt like I had to do something with it. It was made in an era before actual Nazis had re-entered the public dialogue, so it felt like Google Image Search was denigrating Ruby on Rails by including this sort of imagery…

[flagged]

Since when is displaying literal photographic evidence of the Holocaust "denying the holocaust"?

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#90

Post by oxford_comma »

simias wrote: post #79
jeromenerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people in the go team were indeed part of the plan9 team, Rob Pike and Russ Cox to mention a few. Iirc Russ Cox ported Plan9 userspace to Linux when he moved to google, somehow out of frustration. Thanks for that, using acme on Unix is like a hot summer late afternoon fresh beer. Or whatever fresh beverage of your fancy.

I like minimalist and sometimes esoteric dev environments but I must confess that I just don't get acme. I know that some people swear by it but it's hard for me not to think that it's the programming equivalent of listening to music on vinyls. For one thing it's extremely mouse-driven, which is already disqualifying in my book but to each their own. The whole "anything can be a tag and you can execute it by clicking…

Haha. I love the syntax highlighting debate.

I dropped syntax highlighting a few years ago. My thoughts on it are not "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine." I don't like the computer trying to convey what is important in my text files to me via color. What I think is important and what the computer thinks is important is often different. Then why don't I configure my syntax highlighter to agree with me? It's just another configuration file to keep in sync on the computers I use, and :syntax off is right there... It's the nuclear option for being annoyed that comments are shown in light gray.

Post reply on HN