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Comment by exitb | Hacker News Reader

Find is not simple - it's easy, but internally complex. It's fine to solve a complex problem with a complex tool, but it's troublesome when people mostly use it to solve simple problems. And the trouble is that this kind of approach spreads to every single component in the system, which means that we're using insane amount of code and cpu load to solve really simple problems on daily basis.

Plan 9 is not an answer to every problem, but it's just impressive how much it can do with so little code.

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…we're using insane amount of code and cpu load to solve really simple problems on daily basis.

Piping programs together is almost always going to use significantly more resources than one program doing it all. More code doesn’t necessarily imply more resource usage.

Plan 9 is not an answer to every problem, but it's just impressive how much it can do with so little code.

I don’t want to be all around negative about plan 9, but I don’t see it as really solving any interesting problems. Indeed it is far easier to write slim, elegant systems when forgoing feature parity and/or competitive performance.

> More code doesn’t necessarily imply more resource usage.

That's true! Yet, somehow we found ourselves in a situation where most people use computers, to chat, read news etc, all of which would be possible with much less resources. All done with the use of platforms that we literally can't rewrite, as they're too complex. It's certainly not find's fault, but the complexity creep starts somewhere.

Plan 9, as a research OS, is not a useful platform to base your next business on, but it does serve as a baseline we can relate our "real" platforms to.

Little conveniences cost a lot.

Just having a framebuffer with page flipping for seamlessly redrawing the screen costs 64MB of memory at 4K resolution. People did real work and gaming on computers with a small fraction of that.

Early on in the history of computing the framebuffer was discussed as a theoretical construct, like "what could we do with this concept if we had the memory to implement it".

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