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Fashion. The tech industry is in the main not really an engineering industry, but rather a fashion one. That’s why it’s always about the hot new language rather than improving the tried and true. That’s why folks use macOS rather than Linux, and why we use Linux rather than Plan 9, and why Plan 9 was not succeeded by something even better (to be honest, I wonder if maybe we should all be using Multics?).

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This is honestly so true. I'll admit i had to do some research on what plan 9 and Multics is. My only question is why do you think we should be using Multics?

> why do you think we should be using Multics?

No actual evidence, to be honest, and I don’t think it, only wonder it (thus the ‘I wonder if maybe …?’ phrasing). I’ve never used it, I just know that it was in some ways a predecessor of Unix and I believe it was designed as a coherent whole; I wonder if it — like so many other things — could have been iterated on rather than replaced.

It’s so much more fun to replace things, but I have come to think that it is very often less work to evolve a system than to replace one. Not an idea original to me: Joel Spolsky wrote about it in 2000!

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