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by ori_b 147 days ago
How would you connect to Postgres in 4 lines of shell normally? How would you do it for a rest api? How about any other systems?

For Plan 9, it's all the same, all using the same interfaces, with little library glue.

Opening a window, and running a command in it? Similar interfaces. Adding LSP to your editor? Got it, you mount it and write to the files.

Universal shared conventions are powerful.
1 comments
moron4hire 147 days ago
But if it requires understanding of a data protocol, it doesn't really matter if it's over the file system or a socket or flock of coked-up carrier pigeons. You still need to write custom user space code somewhere. Exposing it over the file system doesn't magically make composable applications, it just shuffles the code around a bit.

In other words, the transport protocol is just not the hard part of anything.

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ori_b 147 days ago
It's not hard, but it's sure a huge portion of the repeated boilerplate glue. Additionally, the data protocols are also fairly standardized in Plan 9; The typical format is tabular plain text with '%q'-verb quoting.

There's a reason that the 9front implementation of things usually ends up at about 10% the size of the upstream.

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