Live data from Hacker News

A Week with Plan 9

thedorkweb.substack.com

111–120 of 126 posts

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#111
post #79

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 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.

Basically my opinion regarding using UNIX CLI + vim and emacs.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#112
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…

My Linux-fu might just be to weak but I haven't yet managed to get the Symbolics VM to run. I was wondering, if there exists a Linux VM were someone already got it to work or if you could do it inside a container?

It just seems really cumbersome and that is a shame, because it seems so worth to take a look at it.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#113
post #5

> Plan 9 is as filled with unpolished brilliance as Mozart’s Requiem. It’s the Sagrada Familia of Operating Systems. It’s creators left long ago but people keep building on the scaffolds. If nothing else, it’s a collection of fantastic ideas never intended for mass consumption. This is The Holy Mountain of Operating Systems. Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo. http://www.vitanuova.com/i…

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

> the clean appearance of the screen comes mostly from laziness, but the color scheme is (obviously) deliberate. the intent was to build on an observation by edward tufte that the human system likes nature and nature is full of pale colors, so something you’re going to look at all day might best serve if it were also in relaxing shades. renee french helped me with the specifics of the color scheme (she’s a professional illustrator and my color vision is suspect), once i’d figured out how i wanted it to look. there are still some features of the color system that i put in that i think no one has ever noticed. that’s a good thing, in my opinion; the colors should fade away, if you’ll pardon the expression. having used other systems with different approaches to color screens, most especially windows XP (extra pukey), i think tufte was right.

-rob

rob pike discussing the design of plan9 on the 9fans mailing list back in 2003.

https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558908224071

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#114
post #61
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And nor do they to inferno: https://bitbucket.org/inferno-os/inferno-os/commits/?page=3

No one is speaking about the present. Plan 9 and Inferno are done, historical OSes to learn from and apply in new OS designs.

>Plan 9 and Inferno are done

No they are not, Inferno is still maintained and so is 9front, and Coraid for example uses Plan9 as embedded firmware (EthOS).

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#116
post #114
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is speaking about the present. Plan 9 and Inferno are done, historical OSes to learn from and apply in new OS designs.

>Plan 9 and Inferno are done No they are not, Inferno is still maintained and so is 9front, and Coraid for example uses Plan9 as embedded firmware (EthOS).

Nothing has been added besides keeping them running on new hardware, which boils down to being done.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#117
post #116
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Plan 9 and Inferno are done No they are not, Inferno is still maintained and so is 9front, and Coraid for example uses Plan9 as embedded firmware (EthOS).

Nothing has been added besides keeping them running on new hardware, which boils down to being done.

That's not true, a new Filesystem (hjfs) was made for 9front and lots of other stuff:

http://fqa.9front.org/fqa1.html#1.3.1

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#118
post #101

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 vendor…

And Linux is the only reason I can buy a perfectly capable laptop for $100.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

I’m not laughing at all, I am all for anything that gets people thinking about how shitty most digital typography is compared to what’s in a well-designed book!

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#120
post #116
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Plan 9 and Inferno are done No they are not, Inferno is still maintained and so is 9front, and Coraid for example uses Plan9 as embedded firmware (EthOS).

Nothing has been added besides keeping them running on new hardware, which boils down to being done.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN