I'm a bit surprised that he is happy with a Mac Book. His editor acme requires three mouse buttons and Apple is designed for one mouse button use. Does he use an external mouse all the time? And I'm a bit disappointed that he's not using Plan9. With the current ease of VMs there are no driver and installation issues and he could move the snapshot around.
For acme chording, Rob carries around a tiny external 3-button mouse that he likes. I use the keyboard modifiers. Both approaches work fine.
And that's what I expected to be in the interview. Too bad he drifted off to quickly into his plan9/cloud rant. Thanks for your reply.
A surprisingly ideological interview. Combined with my run-ins with the go-nuts, I have to imagine there's some sort of general cultural coding cohort I've not fully understood yet. This intersection between an obsession with minimalism of a particular sort and dispossession is unknown to me. Seems common to the Go programmers I talk to.
My general take from observing their culture is dogmatic vs pragmatic. plan9 and go are dogmatic, they exist because the status quo is bad and something must be done . This is not to say their ideas are bad! Some of them are great but many of the great ones are brought into the mainstream thru unix (procfs, utf-8) and C (unnamed substructures) :) I just wished they focused on making the mainstream better instead of t…
> I just wished they focused on making the mainstream better instead of this more indirect route...
Personally, I switched to a tiled WM because I didn't want to go back and forth between keyboard and mouse all the time. I want an editor which I can handle using keyboard alone, and only use the mouse when I really have to (web, drawing, games - perhaps I should use a trackball). Acme relies too much on the mouse for me, but I like the idea a lot. There's another couple of issues: syntax highlighting, large scale re…
I'm not sure what you mean by large scale refactoring, but refactoring is much easier in acme compared to any editor I used before because of the powerful sam command language[1] and structural regular expressions[2].
A surprisingly ideological interview. Combined with my run-ins with the go-nuts, I have to imagine there's some sort of general cultural coding cohort I've not fully understood yet. This intersection between an obsession with minimalism of a particular sort and dispossession is unknown to me. Seems common to the Go programmers I talk to.
My general take from observing their culture is dogmatic vs pragmatic. plan9 and go are dogmatic, they exist because the status quo is bad and something must be done . This is not to say their ideas are bad! Some of them are great but many of the great ones are brought into the mainstream thru unix (procfs, utf-8) and C (unnamed substructures) :) I just wished they focused on making the mainstream better instead of t…
Procfs in Linux is completely different compared to the Plan 9 one (or 8th edition Unix for that matter) both in internal organization and in it's purpose and scope.
Frankly, I can't understand how can you criticize Pike for that. That's exactly what he wants: When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. By the way, try Joey Hess' git-annex, now with the assistant. It's just that: a sync and merge system for all your files, which can automatically sync up just about anything (c…
I love git-annex. It is worth pointing out that the XMPP notification is still under heavy development. I don't want to turn people away from git-annex but I also do not want people to get their hopes up for a feature that is not complete yet: Joey described the xmpp work in his most recent blog entry and said it is "really the last big road-bump to making it be able to sync computers across the big, bad internet." h…
He already has a new post out:
Built out the XMPP push notifier; around 200 lines of code. Haven't tested it yet,
but it just might work. It's in the xmpp branch for now. (...)
I doubt the awesome bits of plan9 that he compared to a telephone (pay phone) can be replicated by a higher level service like amazon/google cloud something, git or some other dvcs. 9p is a protocol after all.
He also mentioned doing computing somewhere else, and not just storing data in the cloud.
So please tell me I just need to configure git differently or sign up for amazons newest whatever.
As you noticed yourself, the "dumber" the devices are, the more secure they will be. I'd happily log on to my e-mail account from a device that (I knew) booted an OS image from ROM just before I used it (comparable to those live CD-ROMs for secure applications like e-banking). Let's go back to burning ROMs for OS upgrades instead of flashing/storing them on disk! People can replace batteries, so they shouldn't have t…
Batteries aren't static sensitive, and ROMs aren't available in gigabytes, but apart from that there is a certain appeal in a more secure OS environment. It's a shame that (for example) Windows doesn't make it easier to make the entire system partition read-only, but applications are traditionally so abysmally poor at handling "no you can't write THERE" errors (yes, Photoshop, I'm looking at you) that most people gav…
True ROM chips are by definition available in sizes slightly larger than similarly priced DRAM or SLC flash, it's probably cheapest memory to manufacture. And you would be surprised about how many megabytes of ROM are contained in Android/iOS devices (baseband code is often i mask ROM on chip, modern SoCs tend to have some kind of support core with code in mask ROM and also some ARM acessible mask ROM with things like "low-level" bootloader, if you count reading files from filesystem on MMC and relocating ELFs as "low-level"), even desktop PCs contain significant amount of mask ROM (CPU microcode, sometimes embedded controller code, microcode for various other chips, probably bootloaders for HDD controllers). Bottom line: flash is still more expensive than mask ROM, given enough volume (and by definition will always be).
I'm more interested in ideas themselves than details about how they're marketed. Plan 9 and its novelties are well known and published in detail. The authors of Linux, BSD, OSX, and NT are aware of Plan 9 and decided it wasn't worth imitating. What could be gained by wasting time lobbying to change their minds? They care only for what they and their customers want, and the average Joes that Microsoft and Apple sell o…
A lack of interest in marketing is partly why you don't have a plan9-esque userspace available to you by default.
I do have Plan 9 programs available to me be default, when I install Plan 9. If other people don't choose to do that, so what. I'm not a missionary. Research operating systems aren't a secret. The masses evidently aren't that interested.
Everything you can do with Plan 9 you can do with any other system anyways, only it's marginally more tedious. If people can tolerate that, that's alright with me. What should I care how the masses do their computing? Why should I pester people about it? I don't go around arguing to people how great it is to be a pro-skub star-bellied sneech who eats their bread butter side down. Operating system evangelism and holy wars are older than the internet, and I have become very tired of them.
i will +1 his love for the 11" MacBook Air ... people are always skeptical that i can do pretty much all of my work on it (yes, even some coding), but after almost two years, i still haven't found its small size to be too limiting.
Has the small size affected your vision? I've briefly tried working on a small screen with high DPI and it really hurt my eyes. Maybe I'm getting old-man's eyes. ;)
High DPI should be better for your eyes and easier to read as the jaggies will be less visible. This does assume that you keep sizes the same and just put more pixels into every element.
I can't get behind the idea of every computer I interact with being a dumb terminal. I don't want to assume I'll always have a connection to the mother machine. Even in some ideal world where I always have a high speed connection that never fails, can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down? Not really. I would like to see a nice balance: I basically work locally, and anything I do is synced ASAP to "the c…
You missed the part where he qualifies almost every statement about getting rid of the local disk with, "except for caching". This implies that he's not talking about a dumb terminal.
If your device has frequent (not necessarily constant) internet access this is essentially the same thing as having many regular computers, since your cache can allow you to work offline just like normal. Like git, you would just work on the local "cache", and then sync with other devices when you need to switch or regain internet access.