well, ya, simplicity in this sense is hard to grasp. "complex" here seems to mean a long enumeration of possiblities. "simple" seems to mean a small set of operations that can be composed. like 9p+mount/bind. or more ubiquitously regular expressions.
if you've ever tried to explain regular expressions to someone, perhaps you know what i mean. - erik On Fri Mar 31 03:17:48 CST 2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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. >
