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A Week with Plan 9

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Re: A Week with Plan 9

#91

Post by ori_b »

generalizations wrote: post #62
pedrow wrote: post #28

I enjoyed this article and was impressed with how far the author got in each day's exploration. I always thought Plan9 should have had a comeback as part of the "Internet of Things" given its deep support for networking and its modest hardware requirements (it was designed in the 90s.)

The problem is drivers. They haven't kept up so far as I know and the list of supported hardware is short. Personally I'd love for that to change, but it isn't something I can do.

The list of supported hardware is short, but surprisingly accessible. It's likely that random bargain bin hardware will not be fully supported, but with a few minutes of research it's easy to pick out something that will -- like used Thinkpad.

We even managed to get arm64 support on the Raspberry pi before Ubuntu. :)

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#92

Post by [deleted] »

cycloptic wrote: post #54
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…

Can you please just remove the image? The context is obscure and long gone, and I doubt there is any way for an outsider to see it as anything other than a hateful meme targeted at ruby, given the context of the rest of the memes on that page. Edit to respond to your edit: please can you commit to removing or changing anything else in your documentation that confuses or angers people? I think you have an understandin…

[deleted]

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#93

Post by icedchai »

pjmlp wrote: post #63
the_only_law wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who finds Inferno incredibly ugly compared Plan9’s UI?

A consequence of picking Tk as GUI toolkit, once loved across the UNIX world.

I taught myself Tcl/Tk back in the 90's. It was relatively simple to develop UIs with it. I remember the Tk layout manager was more pleasant than fighting with CSS...

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#94

Post by ywei3410 »

egypturnash wrote: post #86
simias wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You laugh but I'm half-way there; I use underlines/bold for things like TODOS/FIXMES, different fonts for comments, different weight for brackets/keywords etc...

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#95

Post by smazga »

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…

I had an “ah-ha” moment when someone compared the mouse in Acme to vim command mode, and the keyboard to edit mode.

Now sam…that’s an editor I just can’t figure out how to be productive in.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#96

Post by jeromenerf »

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…

I guess you have to use it to see how consistent a workflow it is. The infuriating lack of good keyboard features aside, the acme way is refreshing and inspiring in my experience.

Simple anecdote: many terminal emulators highlight what they recognize as an URL, then make them clickable. Acme allows to make any text clickable and set the selection to a plumber, for action. A path, a git hash, a time stamp, whatever. This is so much better. Some terminal enulators can be used like that, foot natively on wayland, st with patches and urxvt with Perl extensions.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#97

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

jolmg wrote: post #84
flenserboy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interlisp/Medley has sort of revived as an application that runs on your computer: https://interlisp.org/

There’s also Mezzano which is a relatively new, from scratch Common Lisp implementation on bare metal: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

Finally, if you know where to look, it’s possible to setup a Symbolics VM on Linux, which is somewhat interesting to poke around in (all the manuals available out of the box are pretty interesting to read through.)

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#98

Post by slater »

khm wrote: post #71
_ofdw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird flex, to choose to dig your heels in on this particular image/issue.

Given a choice between deleting things that might make me look bad and explaining the choices that I make, I will always choose the latter. It's the only surefire opportunity for me to learn.

"might"?

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#99

Post by thisrod »

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…

> the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book

That might be true.

When you get past the snark, there is a strong argument against syntax highlighting in Plan 9. If your desk is too messy to find anything, tidy it up; if your code is too messy to read, ditto. Syntax highlighting, from this perspective, is like bringing in a mechanical excavator when the answer is to stop digging. If you look at the Plan 9 code, they practiced what they preached.

But that perspective is an elite one, that of research programmers at Bell Labs, where the code is the product.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#100

Post by octetta »

gcblkjaidfj wrote: post #46
MisterTea wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFIK Inferno was a corporate reaction to Java and intended to be an actual competing product. Plan 9 development was halted for nearly a whole year as the team focused on building Inferno.

> Inferno was a corporate reaction to Java they even had a inferno-applet demo, which was a full VM in an activeX(?) container running on the browser.

It was pretty cool. I did a few capability demos for my team back in 2000 using the IE plugin + Limbo + Tk stuff as a replacement for some really bad Perl configuration tools, but could never get any momentum with it. Wish I (and the plan9/Inferno) people were better salespeople.
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