11–20 of 56 posts
Plan 9 from User Space (aka plan9port) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3064180 - Oct 2011 (2 comments)
Plan 9 from User Space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2125731 - Jan 2011 (6 comments)
Plan 9 from User Space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266168 - April 2010 (6 comments)
For those who are unfamiliar, Plan 9 from User Space a pun on Plan 9 from Outer Space, an infamously "so bad it's good" movie from the 1950s. It has this ridiculous bimodal distribution of review scores as a result: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/plan-9-from-outer-space https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/ratings/ https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78785/10-out-world-facts... https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/2…
The more proximal referent is Plan 9 from Bell Labs: https://9p.io/plan9/ > Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present.
For those who are unfamiliar, Plan 9 from User Space a pun on Plan 9 from Outer Space, an infamously "so bad it's good" movie from the 1950s. It has this ridiculous bimodal distribution of review scores as a result: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/plan-9-from-outer-space https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/ratings/ https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78785/10-out-world-facts... https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/2…
The more proximal referent is Plan 9 from Bell Labs: https://9p.io/plan9/ > Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present.
> The name Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a reference to the Ed Wood 1957 cult science fiction Z-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space.[17] The system continues to be used and developed by operating system researchers and hobbyists.[18][19]
For those who are unfamiliar, Plan 9 from User Space a pun on Plan 9 from Outer Space, an infamously "so bad it's good" movie from the 1950s. It has this ridiculous bimodal distribution of review scores as a result: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/plan-9-from-outer-space https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/ratings/ https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78785/10-out-world-facts... https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/2…
The more proximal referent is Plan 9 from Bell Labs: https://9p.io/plan9/ > Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more proximal referent is Plan 9 from Bell Labs: https://9p.io/plan9/ > Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present.
I've suspected; have no evidence to back this up, that "plan9" is a play on the roman numerals IX (9) at the end of "UN IX" and also that "research unix" never had a 9th or 10th version fully developed and released. And, TIL there's another thing called "IX"[1] [1] https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/IX/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more proximal referent is Plan 9 from Bell Labs: https://9p.io/plan9/ > Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present.
That's not funny though, and it's an obvious reference to the movie. > The name Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a reference to the Ed Wood 1957 cult science fiction Z-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space.[17] The system continues to be used and developed by operating system researchers and hobbyists.[18][19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've suspected; have no evidence to back this up, that "plan9" is a play on the roman numerals IX (9) at the end of "UN IX" and also that "research unix" never had a 9th or 10th version fully developed and released. And, TIL there's another thing called "IX"[1] [1] https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/IX/
Here's a funny thing I just found out: in chasing the reference cited by Wikipedia regarding the naming, I learned that UTF-8 was invented for Plan 9. http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html
Acme is an interesting text editor for development. I've used it for React.js development before. Because of how you can script it, I could run Prettier on save and a few other things you'd normally expect in the JS world.
Acme is an interesting text editor for development. I've used it for React.js development before. Because of how you can script it, I could run Prettier on save and a few other things you'd normally expect in the JS world.
It has the smoothest cut/copy/paste routine once you get it down. Moving text around is just buttery. I personally find the lack of highlighting and auto-delimiters is a PITA for HTML/LaTeX though.
𝕚𝕟𝕥 𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻⦅𝑣𝑜𝑖𝑑⦆ ⦃ ⦄
After a brief diversion with the Acme editor (a big part of Plan 9) and some modern Smalltalk environments (Squeak, Cuis, and Pharo), I can't help but feel like we are stuck in a very local optimum as far as UI/UX go. The insane amount of introspection available to you in a Smalltalk image, and the way every bit of text becomes a potential button or action in Acme just put the lack of creativity in modern interfaces.…
One could say much the same thing about emacs and vim as well. emacs, in particular, is essentially nothing more than the elisp interpreter, with some good primitives to build a (some say mediocre) text editor inside a pretty cool operating system. What sort of "weird" do you think would be fun?
One of the really striking things that you're confronted with in a modern Smalltalk is the Morphic UI system. Imagine that, with one click, you could drop into a new window with a live inspector and a (very freeform, repl-ish that's not a repl) REPL loaded into the internal context of any button, window, pane, scrollbar, you name it that you can see right now. (Even my own vocabulary is stifled with the traditional UI/UX we have now!) Now imagine you can do that on any application on your computer. Now imagine you can drag those subcomponents around, rearrange them, drag them onto new windows, modify their code, spawn new ones, and so on all while the thing keeps running and functioning.
If you break something, it's okay. The debugger pops up and allows you to do the same thing that you did when you inspected the widget for any point in the frame in the stack trace. Yes, you can debug, live, multiple levels of your stack trace at the same time, that have live, editable versions of the code as well.
You don't have to imagine it. You can see it here [1] or just download a Smalltalk system yourself.
If the Smalltalk community focused on building some tooling to allow you do develop other languages inside a Smalltalk image based editor, I don't think even Emacs could compete.
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As far as what kinds of weird would be fun, I always find new interaction paradigms fun. That's one of the things I loved the most about Acme. It's kind of crazy how versatile and adaptable "execute the highlighted text in the shell" is as a core interaction loop. If you want to search files for something, just type `grep` in front of the word, select them all, and then you get a new buffer with the results. Which are, of course, editable and executable in the same way.
The two most common places I see experimentation in this are in Linux window managers and programming languages. I've tried StumpWM, i3, and AwesomeWM before. I wish there were more people experimenting with non-tiling things. The person behind this project is doing some very cool stuff [2].
There are tons of people making cool, small (and large) new programming languages like Idris, Janet, Lean, and Pony and lots of people still using really cool old programming languages like APL (or J or K or BQN), Forth, and Scheme (Racket is great, Gerbil built on Gambit is insanely good for a one person project). I see some insanely cool stuff about prototype languages doing staged metaprogramming (lookup Collapsing Towers of Interpreters if you want to read about something really cool, i.e. compiling out the costly abstractions in infinite towers of reflective interpreters), dependently typed experiments, and other wild shit.
Surprisingly, there seems to be a lot (sadly meaning only 2-3 actually separate movements) going on in the "OS space" too with immutable/declarative system specification. I'm referring of course to Nix and Guix and things like Fedora Silverblue and OpenSUSE MicroOS. That's gaining steam quickly. I personally find the Nix language rather fun and interesting in its own right, but I think I'm on the minority side of that.
Broadening out past that, hell I don't know. That's why I put the call out to everyone else :D
[1] https://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc [2] https://codeberg.org/mmontone/mold-desktop