Time ago, Ron said

regarding the madness of making complex software (that time, it was
about configure).

I have allocated half of the presentation lecture for this semester to
"Why does this matter at all". Among other things,
I´ll be comparing gnu cat.c with plan 9 cat.c, so they get the picture.

Any other suggestion?

Please do put up the slides online, if possible, for the benefit of
the students on this list :)

comparing documentation can be instructive - e.g. all the unix socket
calls vs. plan 9's
dial(2) - maybe get them to write a network dialler from first principles using
both interfaces.

it might be a problem trying to illustrate just why complex software can be
so maddening - i think that insight only really comes with the
experience of trying
to maintain and transform one's own (and others') software, along with
the realisation of just how much time is spent maintaining software vs. the
time writing it in the first place.

Top of my over-complex list would be configure.

-Steve

the "slides" are a buch of programs. In fact, I use a terminal to
compile and run
programs from the 9.intro.pdf book. I introduce mistakes and show the
consequences,
and then I fix them.

In this particular course, I use slides just for the introduction
classs. I'll put them on
the web once we update the web pages for the semester.

i think the devolution of gnu grep is quite instructive. once upon a time
it was simple and very fast. (thanks, mike.) today it is neither.

the last time i tried to fix a utf-8 problem (it was 80 times slower
processing utf8 than ascii), i gave up after encountering dozens of
if(special char set){fast version}else{slow version} constructions.

it gets to the heart of why plan9's invention and use (thank's rob, ken) of
utf-8 is so great.

Steve Simon wrote:

My experience with configure is that it seldom selects the compiler
I wanted to use, for some reason preferring the Gnu software even
though the conventional Unix versions work at least as well for the
purpose.

Francisco J Ballesteros wrote:

By the way, I've been reading through that book in my spare time,
and it's a pretty good resource.

erik quanstrom wrote:

If the problem is that Gnu grep converts any non-8-bit character set
to wchar_t (the equivalent of Plan 9 "rune"), then it's not really a
fair criticism of the software. The conversion approach handles a
wide variety of character encoding scheme, whereas grepping the
encodings directly (the fast approach) doesn't work well for many
non-UTF-8 encodings.

In my experience, the one thing that really gets Plan 9 across to people
is the telco server. That's an example of something that you can't nicely
do in Unix, and that exhibits power and elegance as a consequence of a
few basic design choices.