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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I wish I could unflag it.

I've decided to vouch it, but as basic criticism: the purpose of this site is intellectual curiosity, and criticizing Plan 9 as "dead" is the opposite of intellectual curiosity.

Even dead things are worth studying, if for no other reason than to explore the question of why everyone isn't using them (in Plan 9's case, it has a lot more to do with accident of history than any technical limitations... Once POSIX standardized what a UNIX-like OS that managed processes and allowed IPC looked like, everything close-to-but-not-that became also-ran, no matter its technical merits. Esperanto is a fine language, but useless if almost everyone you meet knows English instead).

If plan 9 were dead it wouldn't have a fork that receives patches on a near daily basis with an active community.

The rant was about making Plan 9 out as something potentially useful as a daily driver.

And here I sit, using it daily, and productively.

Strange that.

I will agree it's not for everyone, but I still wouldn't put my mom on Linux either (not for a desktop... absolutely not).

My criticism of Plan 9 as dead is realism, not intellectual incuriosity. Speaking of intellectual incuriosity, I find it astonishing that people are still poking the corpse in an effort to turn it into a daily driver, rather than discussing the insights that made P9 fresh at the time or attempting to discover and apply similar insights today.

Also intellectually incurious: assuming that P9 expired due to POSIX eating its lunch. My personal take on it is that P9 expired partly due to bad licensing decisions but mainly due to a preposterously shitty attitude to Other People's Code. I vividly remember people in the Unix room clustered around the one Windows machine there that could do radical stuff like "run games" and "run a browser". If just a bit more effort had been put into Howard Trickey's APE Plan 9 might well have kept evolving and become useful, but NIH was more important. Or "Invented Here, But Not By The Right People" (C++).

POSIX could have been an asset to Plan 9 - a target to track instead of having to emulate a bunch of disparate Unixen.

If you want POSIX you know where to find it.

If P9 had been able to run a reasonable number of computer programs not written by people at the Labs, it might have survived or at least been more influential beyond "UTF-8, some odd remnant uses of 9P, and /dev/proc". The gratuitous incompatibility assured that the other interesting ideas were buried.

Plan 9 has had a very active development community during the past decade, nothing is preventing people from coming up with interesting ideas and patches, even to APE if that floats one's boat. Mixing different contrasting cultures usually just doesn't work, if you want POSIX, use a POSIX system, if you want Plan 9, go native, i.e. how the system was intended to be used.

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