| I'm enjoying your tone of weary condescension here, as you incorrect me or barrage me with irrelevant counterpoints on almost every point. Mothra - and Abaco, and all the others - are a fiasco. None of them have ever been quality browsers for the time; the fact that no-one has given themselves a hernia trying to carry them forward is just an understandable add-on. The obvious answer has always been right in front of everyone: support standard languages, compilers and tools, even in an emulation layer. Perhaps it could be called "APE", which for some unknown reason you feel the need to furiously incorrect me about ("You mean there is a library"). There was not just a library but a series of programs designed to support the Rest of the World, by Howard Trickey. At one stage I recall claims that it compiled X11. http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape I'm not entirely clear how a project that came with a brace of different executables and its own environment is a "library", but you do you. Your point about /dev/draw is not as profound as you think it is. /dev/bltblt got replaced by some other "everything is a file" resource that works in a roughly similar way? You could have knocked me down with a feather. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will keep pumping rich type-checked (more or less) binary data structures into graphics devices, the way they have for the past 2 decades. There are so many things I really liked about Plan 9; I used it almost exclusively from 1992-1994. The networking was astonishing for the time. The ability to go back to a given day on the file server!!?! But there were a brace of bad decisions that no amount of yelling in Irate Fanboy will compensate for. I wish the things about Plan 9 had been preserved with a view towards building a viable system that, I dunno, was good for more than LARPing for the handful of people that are "willing to put in the effort to run it as a daily driver". Plan 9 as a 'living system' could have re-evaluated some of the architectural decisions that were made in the late 80s and early 90s as practically every detail of hardware, software and networking changed (notably, the idea that a 'thin client' was a good idea pretty much quietly expired). Instead, it's a museum for people to worship every bad decision made by a small group of smart people; every decision glued together into an unwieldy and incompatible ball. |
But that's exactly what it did. And that's exactly the reason you're claiming for it's failure.
What it seems like to me, is that you're trying to have your cake and eat it here. You're saying, on the one hand, that you like Plan9 because of what sets it apart from contemporary and modern systems. Then you're saying that you dislike the distance that it had from those systems because you wish it could have had better interoperability. Do you see how this is inherently contradictory, though? You quite literally cannot have the changes that Plan9 had, and have better interoperability, because those changes were made on a base that is fundamentally conflicting.
It sounds like what you wish they had written UNIX System 8, with Plan 9 Addons™