We just came back from percom, where we
gave a couple of talks about Plan B and Omero.
Perhaps surprisingly, the main problem for
people to understand what we did was not a
particular point in Plan B, but the main Plan 9 idea.
When you say "everything is a file", they get scared.
When you convince them that those "files" are not
files on disk, and that you exchange data using the fs
interface, then their main argument is:
It's so simple that this probably does not work.
Simplicity seems to be hard to grasp. And also, most
people IMHO really forgot unix and what interfaces are
about.
Type checking was also a concern. I think they did not
understand that a data type (or xml tree) is not a guarantee
to have the system know about "semantics". They got
even more scared when I replied that the system should
best not be involved in semantics (which is up to the user).
So, sic.
