On 6/7/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
That's the tricky bit: values of `slightly' in `slightly dirtier' vary widely. My value might be epsilon or zero; others obviously have huge tolerance for rubbish. I'm not convinced that the system has to be made dirtier at all to attract users. Perhaps changes are necessary, but I don't see virtue in dirt.
I'm a firm believer in applications that keep newbies away from the scary, more advanced bits. Mac OS X has been successful in keeping grandma away from the prompt, but it's still a unix underneath. People who want the unix bits can get at them, and do reasonable things with it.
> We need fresh blood. I'm willing to try sacrificing goats but it hasn't work very well in the past. ☺
I guess I'll put my "tools" away then...
I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's got more to do with educating people and getting them to write more-portable code, at least in the long term. Why are numerical programs dependent on obscure gcc extensions?
Honestly, I don't know that Plan 9 can easily absorb a lot of the programs that are already out there. I also don't think that's really so bad. We're different... it probably always makes sense to port some programs from unix that are useful, but it probably doesn't make any sense to port them all, especially when they don't take advantage of the nice system we've got. Dave
