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Comment by asolove | Hacker News Reader

Researching the sam editor is strangely intriguing. See Rob Pike's description of the command language: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pdf

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Acme is also quite interesting. Very strongly influenced by Oberon. There's a Unix port called Wily (http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/), among others.

Speaking of which, does anybody know how to get acme/sam working on Ubuntu? I'd really like to play with it a bit.

In gentoo, I think it's part of the plan9port package. Is there something like that for debian/ubuntu?

Yeah, but it doesn't include acme. :-(

You might try Acme SAC: http://caerwyn.com/acme/

As mentioned by yummyfajitas you can try

plan9port http://swtch.com/plan9port or

9vx http://swtch.com/9vx

and try to get sam running on top of your linux box.

That's quite an overkill ;-)

But cool, nevertheless.

I am a bit ashamed the coolest operating systems on the market today are either Unix-derived/inspired or a lame rehash of VMS.

There is something wrong with this.

It isn't wrong, it is the consequence of a simple principle: "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Quotes

But, again, we had Plan 9. It was great and went nowhere. We had Lisp machines, Smalltalk and Oberon. All of them insanely ahead of their (and perhaps our) time and insanely cool. I can see we couldn't make anything better than Unix. What makes me ashamed is that we should be able to do it and I can't quite grasp why.

Eh, probably some variation of the "good enough" principle. It's hard to get people to switch to something better if it's "only" an evolution, not a revolution.

But that's the point. There were revolutions. Plan 9 was one. Lisp machines were another - an entire environment written in Lisp from top to bottom, as were the Smalltalk machines Xerox built. We had plenty of revolutions after Unix.

OTOH, Lisp is still going strong and regaining lots of followers. Maybe the folks at Bell Labs accidentally hit a local maximum in the OS space...

But I still think we should understand what really happened.

If you want Acme or Sam, the best course is to install plan9port. It's easy and you get the most modern version of the editors. Wily is not very usable, so I recommend avoiding it. The sam that comes in the debian repository is a very old-school black and white version, which works fine, but the plan9ports version has very nice colors and fonts.

It's in the "sam" package.

For acme - 'apt-get install wily' - wily is an acme work-alike. For sam - 'apt-get install sam'.

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