Some of the ideas in Plan 9 are utterly fantastic.
/proc comes from Plan 9, and I remember being awed by the Plan 9 filesystem, which used memory and hard disks to cache a giant WORM jukebox (in the Bell Labs version, anyhow). I forget what the path was but you could just transparently go and have a look at the whole file system on any given day and wander around a read-only version of the fs for that day.
I'm sure there's a lot out there that looks like this now, but this was in 1992/1993.
The compiler was also cool as hell but lacked any of the aggressive optimizations that even gcc has now. It was very much oriented towards incredibly fast compile times rather than squeezing out the last x% of performance through optimization. I believe that the go compiler is a descendant of this one.
On the negative side, it was a very insular culture with an attitude that 'things we don't need to do aren't worth doing'. Avoiding shared libraries is fine, I guess, as is having a minimalist GUI approach. But telling people that shared libraries suck and shouldn't be used and using the fact that _you've_ got a tiny static library that does all the GUI stuff _you_ need as proof seems a bit rich, when the GUI that you produced doesn't have any of the conventional features of a GUI library. When so many things are being changed at once it's pretty easy to conflate two unrelated things into a 'win' (e.g. 'haha, we don't have a lame shared library system on our machine, and by the way, Motif sucks anyhow').
It's fine up to a point but it was starting to ring very hollow when you had go to another machine to run a web browser that looks even faintly like an actual web browser.
This may all have changed; it's been a long time since I had anything to do with P9. But I think the 90s are the point where Plan 9 decisively 'missed the boat' and the insularity and general attitude was part of the problem. If 'ape' (ANSI Posix environment) had been better maintained and taken seriously Plan 9 might have been considerably more popular and its alternate (frequently superior) ways of doing things might have taken off.
/proc comes from Plan 9, and I remember being awed by the Plan 9 filesystem, which used memory and hard disks to cache a giant WORM jukebox (in the Bell Labs version, anyhow). I forget what the path was but you could just transparently go and have a look at the whole file system on any given day and wander around a read-only version of the fs for that day.
I'm sure there's a lot out there that looks like this now, but this was in 1992/1993.
The compiler was also cool as hell but lacked any of the aggressive optimizations that even gcc has now. It was very much oriented towards incredibly fast compile times rather than squeezing out the last x% of performance through optimization. I believe that the go compiler is a descendant of this one.
On the negative side, it was a very insular culture with an attitude that 'things we don't need to do aren't worth doing'. Avoiding shared libraries is fine, I guess, as is having a minimalist GUI approach. But telling people that shared libraries suck and shouldn't be used and using the fact that _you've_ got a tiny static library that does all the GUI stuff _you_ need as proof seems a bit rich, when the GUI that you produced doesn't have any of the conventional features of a GUI library. When so many things are being changed at once it's pretty easy to conflate two unrelated things into a 'win' (e.g. 'haha, we don't have a lame shared library system on our machine, and by the way, Motif sucks anyhow').
It's fine up to a point but it was starting to ring very hollow when you had go to another machine to run a web browser that looks even faintly like an actual web browser.
This may all have changed; it's been a long time since I had anything to do with P9. But I think the 90s are the point where Plan 9 decisively 'missed the boat' and the insularity and general attitude was part of the problem. If 'ape' (ANSI Posix environment) had been better maintained and taken seriously Plan 9 might have been considerably more popular and its alternate (frequently superior) ways of doing things might have taken off.