[plinkplonk]

"Plan 9 is clearly superior to Linux. It has cleaner interfaces, one person can understand it, lot's of things are unified that were disparate etc. etc. "

I have no argument with this,

"Everyone who uses both extensively berates Linux at every turn."

I seriously doubt this. Please provide any evidence you have.

If the makers of plan 9 were to say "Linux is crap" at least they have the credibility to say so. It is noteworthy that they would never say something so stupid. Linux (and yes Plan 9) aren't the acme of perfection. But neither are the "lisp os" es. Raising ancient lisp systems to some unreachable pedestal of perfection , especially by people who've never seen or used on and have just read about them, is dubious

This is just a blogger with lots of crummy blog posts and no code. At best he is incoherent and at worst deluded.

To repeat my point was not that Linux is the best OS ever. But for me (or anyone else) to go around screaming that everything that is popular is all delusion is pointless (and strictly imo) shouldn't be paid any attention.

"The previous winners of the "Language of the Year" award are shown below.

    Year	Winner
    2008 	C
    2007 	Python
    2006 	Ruby
    2005 	Java
    2004 	PHP
    2003 	C++"

And the point is? Most of them are fine languages and worthy of "langauge of the year" at least when measured in terms of popularity.

"Popularity means nothing"

Popularity is not everything but it sure isn't "nothing" either.

[wendroid]

> Please provide any evidence you have.

Only the power of my own ear at Plan9 conferences from people who know a damn sight more about such things than I. I could pull various mailing list posts out, such as the big argument of Rob Pike with Linus but what's the point.

> If the makers of plan 9 were to say "Linux is crap" at least they have the credibility to say so. It is noteworthy that they would never say something so stupid.

From the Plan9 fortune file : "Linux: written by amateurs for amateurs." - D. Presotto

> And the point is?

That the technical merit of the language doesn't determine it's popularity. So choosing what is the "better language" is rendered pointless.

>Popularity is not everything but it sure isn't "nothing" either.

Yes, I read that back after the edit time ran out and wanted to change it. Popularity and userbase isn't the correct metric for quality.

[plinkplonk]

""Linux: written by amateurs for amateurs." - D. Presotto"

This is (in a strict sense) true and is not the same as "linux is crap". Linus was certainly an amateur when he wrote the first version of the kernel in the sense that was the first OS kernel he wrote) and many people who contribute are not tenured professors(or whatever your definition of "professional" happens to be). The fact remains that an "amateur" teenager in Finland ran rings around the "professionals".

"That the technical merit of the language doesn't determine it's popularity. So choosing what is the "better language" is rendered pointless."

I agree. But that is the point isn't it? You can't choose "the better language" anyway. The mythical Lisp OS isn't really "better" either unless you've made up your mind up front. So why go on and on for years (the blogger not you)about "everything popular is crap and Lisp is the ultimate leet cool thing forever and forever and anyone who doesn't accept this is an idiot" instead of focussing on actually writing some code?

[wendroid]

We are in agreement, mostly :).

I don't know which professionals rings around were run, but again, who cares, that's just conjecture, the conjuncture was between a need for a free Unix, BSD sat in court, the GPL, LAMP. The result was the cartesian product that remains today.

In the world of worse is better, Plan9 wasn't bad enough !

[plinkplonk]

"In the world of worse is better, Plan9 wasn't bad enough !"

ha! Great comment! :-) I wish someone would write a book on Plan9 (like the Lion's Commentary book for Unix).

[wendroid]

There's this http://lsub.org/who/nemo/9.pdf

and the intro to plan9 http://lsub.org/who/nemo/9.intro.pdf

and, tbh, I've read the kernel source code and it isn't that hard to follow - which is one of the goals - there's even an LXR http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/?v=PLAN9