A Week with Plan 9 • Hacker News Board

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#101

Post by tomcam » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 12:43 AM UTC

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.

Doing the first 90% of an operating system is pretty straightforward. Doing fun demos with it is fun. But Microsoft is severely underrated for its incredible skill in, and ability to put massive resources behind, the last 10%. That includes stuff like device drivers, getting hundreds of thousands of disparate components to work together, supporting hundreds of file formats, working with a gigantic landscape of vendors, 35 years of compatibility, and so forth. Microsoft is the only reason you and I can buy a perfectly capable laptop for $500.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#102

Post by apricot » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 1:01 AM UTC

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…

You wrote: "If we removed everything that confused or angered people, it would be a full-time job"

If I rephrase it as "Let's keep the Nazi pictures that confuse and anger people because it would be too much work to remove them", does that help you understand why people aren't happy with your decision?

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#103

Post by rckrd » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 1:11 AM UTC

Minikube uses a 9p FS for sharing files between host and VM. Fairly easy to implement, and runs completely in user space

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#104

Post by Volt » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

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.

"It's just their humour"

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#105

Post by cnasc » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 2:32 AM UTC

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...

Not quite that, but I used this theme for a good 6 months once: https://github.com/11111000000/tao-theme-emacs

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#106

Post by analognoise » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 4:50 AM UTC

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #97

jolmg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

Oh wow, another retro computing system I now need to go exploring.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#107

Post by enw » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 5:43 AM UTC

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.

This sort of humor was/is very common on 4chan and similar imageboards such as Krautchan.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#108

Post by Technically » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:12 AM UTC

housel wrote: post #83

Technically wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do we know what distribution they use?

No; however, drivers are pretty easily portable among the distros. The differences are mostly userspace details and driver selection. I can't imagine they have difficulty navigating their own setups.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#109

Post by __m » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:27 AM UTC

thisrod wrote: post #99

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…

> 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…

I would argue that highlighting the syntax is tidying up. It doesn’t stop you from keeping the code clean. Shooting yourself in the foot in order to not walk that much isn’t a compelling argument.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#110

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:33 AM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #93

pjmlp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yep, that is why when modern Web developers talk about responsive design being invented by the Web, it just shows not having a proper background in native toolkits.