Plan 9's "historical" role is not in question. That same book I quoted in
my original post says that the /proc filesystem in FreeBSD is modelled
after Plan 9's totally generic approach to representing a running system
and its resources. Fine, but not "on-topic." There're many research
platforms--some we've heard of, some we've not--whose innovations are
"backported" into production systems but that doesn't make those platforms
useful to the general user.

Which types of programmers?

1. Casual programmers, e.g. an admin who finds out a few lines of code
could lighten their burden

2. Programmers in need of a dirty-but-quick solution, e.g. a prototype

3. Hobby programmers, i.e. those who learn out of curiosity and aren't
"forced" to remain loyal to a specific system's quirks and general edginess

Maybe this is a troll, but I'll answer anyway.

I would say 1, 2, 3, and 5 benefit from using plan9.
4 and 7 don't notice much whether they are using plan9.
6 aren't likely to get to use plan9, though their jobs
would be a lot easier if they could use acid (the
debugger, not the recreational substance).

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 1:47 AM, Eris Discordia gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe more appropriate in your case - Plan 9 is not for Windows sys admins.

Please describe the process of accessing an audio device on a computer
across the room with windows and describe how you can do it from the
shell...

-eric

Eric, I don't know what this "audio" thing you CS/CE type researchers
are using but us lowlifes just need Firefox and Excel before we can
use Plan 9. I'm afraid that until you can provide those, Joe Public
will never use Plan 9 and it will be forever doomed to run only on
supercomputers and storage systems and in research settings.

John "Bob Dobbs" Floren

As a first approximation, there are two types of computer users.
There are the ones who just want something that does everything
they need it to, out of the box, and then there are the ones who
don't care so much what it can do at first, but they want to be able
to adapt the system to their needs as time goes on.
If you want, you can call the former "end users" and the latter
"programmers." These camps have very different mindsets.

Most of your arguments seem to be about creating a system for
the "end users," but as Rob said, Plan 9 is not primarily for them.
Plan 9 is for people who want a system they can understand and customize
and adapt to their own purposes. I don't mean setting a couple of buttons
in a preference dialog, either. I mean writing actual programs to make
the system do something its designers did not explicitly anticipate.
When the computer doesn't already have some feature, it's a question
of thinking "this dumb system should already have that feature"
versus thinking "how can I add that feature?"

On Jul 1, 2008, at 9:32 AM, john@csplan9.rit.edu wrote:

-> WARNING: It's time to be brutally honest again. Take a deep breath.
<-

I'm 15. I run Plan 9 on a 20" iMac in the corner of my room at home. I
hardly use Excel, and I don't usually browse the web on Plan 9 (or
with Firefox - I use Safari on Mac). Yet I find myself using Plan 9
50%% of my computing day. The commonest two things I do are coding and
document typesetting. I like Plan 9's completeness of programming
environment (I'd like to see Ruby beat lib*) and the authenticity of
the typesetting tools (the original reason I started with Plan 9) was
compelling.

(But sarcasm seems to escape you.... :-))

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Pietro Gagliardi mac.com> wrote:

If only we transmitted messages by voice. It's much easier to
understand the sarcastic nature. (And you need to get me in a good
mood.)

On Jul 1, 2008, at 5:53 PM, Dan Cross wrote: