On 11/14/06, ron minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 11/14/06, erik quanstrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> who said we have to be like the rest of the world. i thought the
> point of plan 9 was to be different. the rest of the world uses sockets
> and nfs, too. ;-)
;-) taken :-)
we have to be, not just different, but better. Some aspects of Plan 9
strike me as different for difference's sake. I don't see a point to
it.
I didn't immediately either. However I've been organizing my data in
hierarchies thanks to the Unix filesystem for a long long time now,
people are starting to realize that searching for data based on
metadata and getting fuzzy results is sometimes better when you have
92 Terrabytes of data in your iMac. Ok, that's an exaggeration, but
you get my point I'd hope.
I think a lot of the way editors were written in the 80s was due to
the fact that people probably didn't really "get" the mouse the way I
think it was intended to be uhm... gotten.
If you look back at the englebart demos, I see a lot of things that
make me think more of Acme than emacs or vi. I also kind of want a
chording keyboard on my left now as a result.
The necessary momentum to make people change their minds on some
things can be really difficult to achieve, and sometimes the effort to
learn something better does distract from the focus of getting work
done. In effect better becomes the enemy of good enough (Voltaire?)
So that's why people still use Fortran on giant MPI clusters :-). And
why Lisp will never take over the world, and why Acme will always be
subject to patches to make cursors move with arrow keys.
I think it's just human nature.
