Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995) • Hacker News Board

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#31

Post by ChuckMcM » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 8:16 PM UTC

throwaway64 wrote: post #28

ChuckMcM wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rob Pike and the other folks who developed Plan 9 worked at AT&T's Bell Laboratories. Nothing developed in a Bell Lab has ever been 'free' directly. Rather folks who have seen the research and been inspired by it have made changes to their free stuff which you use every day. There are influences from Plan 9 in Linux (the /proc file system for example which was influenced by the SunOS /proc filesystem which was influe…

not true, plan9 as of the 4th edition has a OSI/FSF approved license.

Ah there you go, I sit corrected. It was free as of June 2002, so presumably for the last 10 years we could have been using it instead of Linux.

However, I would guess that had it been freely available when it was released in the early 90's then it actually would have more of a presence vis-a-vis Linux today.

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#32

Post by rjzzleep » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 8:34 PM UTC

it's a shame the first paragraph is exactly what we're once again moving away from. all hail cloud computing

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#33

Post by bediger4000 » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 8:37 PM UTC

gchpaco wrote: post #7

scarmig wrote: post #6

Let me know when they release a decent editor for it...

Sam and acme are both very good; they're weird, certainly, and very different from editors before and since but they are quite nice to work in. At least the equal of vi.

I tried very seriously to use Sam instead of vi. My main criticism of it is that you have to be a pixel-perfect mouse acrobat to use it efficiently. I'm not pixel-perfect. I couldn't use the graphical parts of Sam, and that kind of negated all the rest of it. It did have some very interesting (to me, as a programmer) ways of doing things, including structural regular expressions.

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#34

Post by shawndumas » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 8:45 PM UTC

Arelius wrote: post #29

4ad wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Plan 9 much because it lacks a modern web browser, though I miss it dearly. I get some comfort on Linux and Mac OS X by using Russ Cox's excellent port of the Plan 9 tools to Unix[1]. To me, the most important Plan 9 tool is of course, the editor, Rob Pike's acme[2]. [1] http://swtch.com/plan9port/ [2] http://acme.cat-v.org/

Could you talk about the editor? Without knowing the editor specifically, it'd would seem at a severe disadvantage to either editors with much large communities (vi, emacs) or editors that are much more modern (textmate, sublime?).

http://code.google.com/p/acme-sac/downloads/list

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#35

Post by dleimbach » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 8:52 PM UTC

bbguitar wrote: post #17

Phew, Nostalgia indeed. I looked a Plan 9 back in late 90's when we were doing research for alternative OS's and ways of sharing stuff securely across a network without the cruft of DFS... It had a lot of promise. What did become of it I wonder?

Coraid ships ATA over ethernet storage based on Plan 9.

Bell Labs still uses plan 9 internally and develops it.

9front is a community fork of Plan 9 with a bunch of interesting changes.

There's a small but interested community of die-hard plan 9'ers that care about it, and the principles it set forth. A lot of it came from some very good, very sane development with people who often spend more time thinking than coding (a virtue we could all benefit from I think)

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#36

Post by presotto » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 9:15 PM UTC

noselasd wrote: post #26

zheng wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, first question, why aren't we all using Plan 9 instead of a linux-based OS? Maybe more importantly, what could the next upstart kernel/OS do different than Plan 9 if it wants to be more successful?

* It's not enough to be better to displace something ubiquitous (as unix like systems are today). You likely have to be orders of magnitude "better". * Do not be hostile to your potential users. (The community that formed around Plan 9 as it went open source were quite hostile, there's no need for public beatings just because someone suggests to port X11 to Plan 9 even if it's a bad idea).

You're right. We were assholes. We still are.

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#37

Post by davidw » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 9:17 PM UTC

noselasd wrote: post #26

zheng wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, first question, why aren't we all using Plan 9 instead of a linux-based OS? Maybe more importantly, what could the next upstart kernel/OS do different than Plan 9 if it wants to be more successful?

* It's not enough to be better to displace something ubiquitous (as unix like systems are today). You likely have to be orders of magnitude "better". * Do not be hostile to your potential users. (The community that formed around Plan 9 as it went open source were quite hostile, there's no need for public beatings just because someone suggests to port X11 to Plan 9 even if it's a bad idea).

> The community that formed around Plan 9 as it went open source were quite hostile

I remember at FOSDEM a few years back, there was this Spanish dude and some of his friends, who were frothing-at-the-mouth fans of Plan 9, and, as they became progressively more inebriated in the place where a bunch of us were staying, he kept ranting louder and louder (and more by himself) about the perceived injustices and deficiencies of a world where Linux was more popular than something so beautiful, so elegant, as Plan 9.

It was ... a bit disturbing to watch. That kind of passion should be reserved for relationships with other people.

I think part of the problem with its diffusion was that it only became free software a decade after Linux, with no clear niche to attack (see: Crossing the Chasm) and make its own.

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#38

Post by jff » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 9:24 PM UTC

zheng wrote: post #21

jff wrote: post #12

Plan 9 pops up on the front page from time to time, and I see a lot of people expressing a lot of misconceptions about it. I know there are at least 2 or 3 other Plan 9 users on this site, and they help try to clear up some of the questions. I've done quite a bit of poking around in Plan 9, but of course I don't know all of it. I've hacked in the kernel and worked on the 64-bit version as well, I've fooled with the c…

Ok, first question, why aren't we all using Plan 9 instead of a linux-based OS? Maybe more importantly, what could the next upstart kernel/OS do different than Plan 9 if it wants to be more successful?

There have been some great answers from others in this thread already. Here's my take on things:

1. As others pointed out, Plan 9 was not initially free. If you go back and look at the very oldest messages from the 9fans mailing list (http://9fans.net/archive/, starts in 1993) you'll see lots of messages from people just trying to figure out how to get a license. At the same time, you could get Linux for free or very cheap.

2. Plan 9 is unfamiliar for new users. Face it: most people define "intuitive", "powerful", and "useful" as "that thing I'm already used to". Programming in Plan 9 is pretty similar to programming Unix, and the shell feels much the same, but you still need to learn new concepts and people don't like that.

3. Plan 9 is not Unix. People have, from the beginning, wanted to reshape Plan 9 in the image of the Unix/Linux environments they are familiar with, even when it doesn't make sense. They want Emacs or Vim, without having even tried Acme or sam. They want bash, ssh, X11, Firefox, and GNOME. Some of this software, like ssh, X11, and even Vim, have been ported or re-implemented because they're useful for interoperability with Unix or simply because somebody wanted it bad enough to do the port (Vim).

Those aren't the only reasons, but they're pretty substantial.

As for what the next kernel/OS should do, I'd say it's not enough to just exist and be good. You have to be used widely and have enough developers become familiar with it. If, for instance, some engineer at Facebook comes up with a nifty kernel and convinces them to start using it on all their servers, that kernel will probably be successful outside because there's suddenly a massive deployment of it.

Alternately, if you can get into a market that's less entrenched than the desktop, you may have a chance. We saw this to some extent with netbooks (some of the earliest ones shipped with Linux by default), we've definitely seen it with smartphones, and I have a feeling that we may see it in tablets. The problem with the desktop frequently comes down to: "Why can't it run Firefox and open my Word documents?"

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#39

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 9:26 PM UTC

catenate wrote: post #18

jff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As gchpaco points out, both sam and acme are pretty usable. Acme makes a good enough programming editor that I use it for all my coding at work, while I keep a tarball of the original sam port on a server for those times when I have to use a system with a crappy version of vi and no admin privileges to install something better. Oh, and you can run Vim on Plan 9 now. But it's kind of like visiting a foreign country an…

I used emacs for 11 years (93-04) and then acme-like editors (wily, plan9port acme, Acme SAC, Inferno acme) for 8 years (04-). Acme (especially guide files) made a distinct and pervasive change to my working style that emacs never did: sped me up, prevented me from forgetting, gave me help just when I need it, and reduced errors. Inferno's VM gave me a minimal unix environment whose executable and my scripts I can ta…

Is there any articles about workflow/philosophy of sam ? I recall stumbling upon few videos, too introductory to be interesting compared to the emacs/vim-fu we're used too nowadays.

Re: Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

#40

Post by krevmax » Fri, Aug 17, 2012, 9:33 PM UTC

Reading through the archives of the Plan 9 mailing list at http://9fans.net/archive you can follow along with the progress of Linux and the web as they completely displaced and then decimated operating systems research, culminating in famous Pike's utah2000 paper. You see each casual user show up on the mailing list demanding "modern" features, arguing about the license, screeching about security "holes" they don't understand, before, ultimately, declaring that they are retreating to Linux (or, later, Mac OSX), where at least they can play Flash games and login to turbotax.com and watch Youtube videos.