Something something stewing in their own juices for too long something something.

The people who created Plan 9 (and Unix) this days are working on something that has a better chance of blowing a hole through the huge mess that is modern software: Go ( http://golang.org )

I might be naive, but Go is the only thing that has given me some hope for the future of software development in recent times, it means there is a chance that maybe some day I will be able to write software in an environment and with tools that are not byzantine hideously insane piles of layers gratuitiously complex crud.

Hell, with Go you completely bypass even libc (but unlike Plan 9, you still can take advantage of the hardware and software support of existing operating systems/kernels, that sadly are an unavoidable mess, which is one of the things that made it impossible to adopt in practice).