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Why do you believe it is impossible to display a web page of text on screen without a 3D graphics accelerator adapter card? Haven't you ever used a computer without a Nvidia in it before? A young kid like you might be surprised to learn that there was a time not so long ago when most computers didn't have 3D accelerator cards, and that they were still more than capable of rendering a page of information and driving their displays.

Johannes Gutenberg produced the primary, and, by far, the most serious, application for type setting 575 years ago, long before the era of the Linux desktop. It's called The Book. Read one some time, and maybe you'll learn what a comma is for.

there's no credible way you can claim that the Bell monopoly was healthy for the economy.

The Bell monopoly invented the transistor. I think there's a credible claim that could be made that the invention of the transistor was healthy for the economy.

Why do you find that so repugnant that it moves you to write resentful comments about it? The entire point of researching and publishing computer operating systems is to discover and share new methods and ideas. I doubt that the Plan 9 authors published dozens of papers and gave countless lectures in order to discourage others in their field from building on their work. They didn't discuss their ftp filesystem multiple times in their publications in the hopes that nobody would ever implement anything like it ever again. That the Hurd authors profitably exchanged ideas with another operating systems group is beneficial to everyone and shouldn't fill you with spite.

If the world needed OpenBSD programmers to write high-impact replacement software so badly, the world would offer to pay for it. And since evidently no one wants to pay them to do so, it seems pretty reasonable to expect that the unpaid programmers -- volunteering their free time to write programs that they give away to the world for free -- would set their own priorities, address their own needs, and invest their time and effort however they see fit.

You were blunt enough the first time. I don't care what you do on your computer. I can continue happily writing programs after you've forgotten about Plan 9. If people stop nagging me to write them a stupid web browser, and I stop nagging people to use my stupid toy operating system, everyone can be happy that way.

I guess I didn't explain my popularity contest arguments from earlier very well because since this is where all Plan 9 discussions end up, I took it for granted, but this winning friends and evangelizing stuff is what I was talking about.

Among programmers, Plan 9 is not so obscure. Anyone with an interest in programming something besides a commodity system has stumbled across it or seen it mentioned somewhere. Plan 9 was built to be practical and its authors wrote about its practical advantages at length, so anyone who cares can just go to the web site and read about it. Anyone who wants or has an interest in what Plan 9 offers already has everything they need.

Instead of telling people what they either don't care about or already know, I'd rather spend my own time writing my own programs. Unless someone is waving dollar bills in front of my face, I have no interest in convincing people that they should use a research operating system that doesn't fit their needs so they can write programs for it to fit their needs. Unless I'm getting paid or feeling uncharacteristically generous with my time, I'm not going to take too close an interest with what other people do with their computers.

I'm not objecting to bloat or Clippies or any of that other stuff. I'm objecting to this frame of mind that people have which laments the lack of web browsers, has no interest or intent to write one themselves, but then wonders why no one has spontaneously written one for them free of charge, and then decides Plan 9 is a waste or non-starter on account of it. I don't mind if someone decides Plan 9 sucks† or isn't right for them, but the logic some people in this thread have used to arrive at that conclusion is unreasonable. There's no money in it, and the marginal utility of a word processor on Plan 9 over a word processor on Windows is evidently negligible enough that no one has taken a personal interest in writing one for themselves.

All of the features fantasized about in this thread you could write yourself if you wanted to and had the time and money. If the person lamenting the lack of a spreadsheet program lacks either the time or money or interest to write it, it shouldn't be much surprise that everyone else lacks them too. It is unreasonable to dismiss a system because no uncommonly charitable programmer has donated their time to write programs that they don't personally need or get paid for. Toilets are valuable enough that people pay plumbers to put them in their houses so they don't have to piss on their mattresses, but apparently no one can think of anything valuable enough about a Plan 9 word processor that they would be willing to do anything that would make it a reality.

Really none of this is specific to Plan 9 or even to computers. Maybe I should have bit my tongue, rolled my eyes, and kept quiet like I normally do.

† It does.

This discussion is becoming a little uncivil, but I'll try to stay on-track.

"Nobody will [care] about your [...] operating system if it consistently fails to be useful for day-to-day work."

Nobody except those who already find it useful for their day-to-day work, some of whom have already explained the system's utility to them in this thread. Only if you think popularity is the only way to judge the utility of a computer operating system can you so easily dismiss such a large and influential body of work.

I posed a question earlier which you didn't address, and if you think chasing after mass appeal isn't pointless you should have an answer for: What would a word processor or web browser on Plan 9 (which everyone here seems to agree is cool) enable you to do that you can't already do elsewhere?

It's completely unreasonable. Why would someone want to waste a bunch of their time and money writing word processors and web browsers to win a pointless popularity contest? What would a word processor or web browser on Plan 9 enable you to do that you can't do already on Windows? Mass appeal is not the only way to evaluate the merits of a computer operating system, and Plan 9 isn't going to go to waste because it wasn't the most popular way to watch Youtube videos and write TPS reports.

"I'd much rather have seen it built around scheme, [...]"

It's not meant to be built around any language. If there's a language you want to use, just start using it. All you need is access to the system calls. The whole point of making everything a file system is so that you don't have to cram everything together in the same address space. There's no foreign function interfaces or calling conventions you have to deal with if you want to use a new language with the system. It's all reads and writes. Ocaml, Haskell, and ML all have read and write, so if you want to use a less primitive language, there's nothing stopping you.

No one is stopping you from porting whatever you please. All you have to do is sit down and do it. If I had to guess, I'd say that the main barrier you face is that you de-installed it.

About eleven people who once worked on Plan 9 and Inferno are now at Google: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/alumni.html

Every second hand shop I've ever been to has a whole shelf of typewriters for less than $5.

Some junk mailers scrape the web for addresses:

  King George II
  Kermit Project
  612 W 115th St
  New York, NY 10025-7721

The graph at http://www.unix-diagram.org/ has it as well as many others not listed in the article.

I think I can one-up you.

  (while :; do cat ; sleep 2 ; done) <file

It's not unusual for an operating system to require its programs to use its system calls. A Unix program that doesn't speak Unix protocols is just as useless as a Plan 9 program that doesn't speak Plan 9 protocols. It's a moot point though, since you'd have a difficult time unwittingly making a compiler generate a program that doesn't work on its own operating system.

Pipes on Plan 9 use the same pipe, read, write, and close system calls as Unix does; they are an equivalent amount of work to use (or adopt, as you say).

Oberon does exactly this. X and Plan 9 do so as well, but without the markers.

If you want to know what the script does, reading the script would be the obvious solution. Why should this program's author hold your hand and explain the script in prose when the script clearly explains itself already in its own language? The guy isn't demanding that you run it blindly. Maybe he figured anyone smart enough to write Prolog programs is smart enough to understand the implications of downloading and running a shell script.

The idea of never free()ing and then taking advantage of that with a dumb allocator to get better performance is pretty clever.

Ken Thompson's C compiler does this.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/cc/comp...

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/cc/lex.... (near the end)

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/cc/macb... (near the end)

The Hurd authors might find your part-time projects just as sad and pathetic as you find theirs. There's not much I can say beyond that, since you've based your judgement on vague and wishy-washy concepts like going somewhere, being "vaguely competitive", and keeping up. It's no business of yours to criticize the direction of a project you have no involvement or stake in, especially when you can't articulate what direction you'd prefer.

Reading the Plan 9 kernel code hasn't convinced me that its authors focused on correctness. The kernel code is pretty, and its twenty-year-old architecture could pass as only ten years old; but even excluding drivers, there is no shortage of bugs.

"The benefits outweigh the risk for 99.9% of players"

Does the data support that or did you make that up? This would be a more interesting discussion if it has some scientific substance.

Sorry for spoiling your fun, but Plan 9 has a $tabstop environment variable: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/0intro

>every instance can export its monitoring information as 9p virtual filesystem

How do you handle authentication?

They're not so creepy compared to some of the artist's other work: http://reneefrench.blogspot.com/

That particular Xkcd comic has been posted 79 times in the past year or so† and has quickly become a cliché. The authors' stated goals are to make a "purely functional" and "practical 100% free" package manager.†† They don't mention competition, proliferation, or winning market share. A vague hope of consistency and cohesion accompanying the announcement of a program "approaching its first alpha release" isn't a rallying cry. I think they made this announcement simply so that people interested in this sort of thing might take a look.

† http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=http%3A%2F%...

†† http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/ROADMAP

If you forget to save your file, it won't be on your Plan 9 file server either. The only program which has the state persistence you describe is acme which can dump its state to a file and load it again later, but most every editor on every operating system can do that. And you have to run the Dump command manually, so if you forget, you lose your state the same as you would if you forgot to save before unplugging your terminal.

I do have Plan 9 programs available to me be default, when I install Plan 9. If other people don't choose to do that, so what. I'm not a missionary. Research operating systems aren't a secret. The masses evidently aren't that interested.

Everything you can do with Plan 9 you can do with any other system anyways, only it's marginally more tedious. If people can tolerate that, that's alright with me. What should I care how the masses do their computing? Why should I pester people about it? I don't go around arguing to people how great it is to be a pro-skub star-bellied sneech who eats their bread butter side down. Operating system evangelism and holy wars are older than the internet, and I have become very tired of them.