It's not entirely abandoned. A few years ago Brad Fitzpatrick dropped by my desk because the latest Google Compute Engine virtualization stack rollout had broken Plan 9 on GCE. This was interfering with cutting a new Go release (the official releases ran on VMs running Plan 9). I don't remember the specific breakage, but that was the day we added Plan 9 to the stable of operating systems we run in our CI regression suite against new VM releases.
I don't know if the Go releases are still done on Plan 9, but it seems likely that's still an active use of the OS.
Some people in the go team were indeed part of the plan9 team, Rob Pike and Russ Cox to mention a few.
Iirc Russ Cox ported Plan9 userspace to Linux when he moved to google, somehow out of frustration. Thanks for that, using acme on Unix is like a hot summer late afternoon fresh beer. Or whatever fresh beverage of your fancy.
Google+ wasn't good for much, but following Rob Pike was always interesting as he was doing Plan 9 stuff and talking about Go often on there. Linus Torvalds also frequently posted on G+ and was interesting. Twitter just doesn't fill that same space.
I like minimalist and sometimes esoteric dev environments but I must confess that I just don't get acme. I know that some people swear by it but it's hard for me not to think that it's the programming equivalent of listening to music on vinyls.
For one thing it's extremely mouse-driven, which is already disqualifying in my book but to each their own.
The whole "anything can be a tag and you can execute it by clicking the middle mouse button" can seem novel and exciting if you've never used Emacs, which did the whole "everything is configurable and scriptable" a long time ago and IMO better.
Then the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book. I tried to give that a chance but when you listen to the arguments of its proponents it often boils down to "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine" which makes complete sense unless you think about it for two seconds.
I genuinely don't get it. When I first read a Vi(m) tutorial it seemed esoteric, complicated and weird, but I understood why some people found it more efficient that way. Watching somebody explain acme reminds me of TempleOS, filled with weird idiosyncrasies of dubious usefulness while lacking super basic features.
"books are black on white and we read those just fine"
Now I wanna see a B&W syntax highlighting setup that uses all the tools available to a book. Font sizes, bold/italics, the use of display fonts here and there, including Comic Sans to highlight Really Bad Ideas...
You laugh but I'm half-way there; I use underlines/bold for things like TODOS/FIXMES, different fonts for comments, different weight for brackets/keywords etc...
> the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book
That might be true.
When you get past the snark, there is a strong argument against syntax highlighting in Plan 9. If your desk is too messy to find anything, tidy it up; if your code is too messy to read, ditto. Syntax highlighting, from this perspective, is like bringing in a mechanical excavator when the answer is to stop digging. If you look at the Plan 9 code, they practiced what they preached.
But that perspective is an elite one, that of research programmers at Bell Labs, where the code is the product.
I guess you have to use it to see how consistent a workflow it is. The infuriating lack of good keyboard features aside, the acme way is refreshing and inspiring in my experience.
Simple anecdote: many terminal emulators highlight what they recognize as an URL, then make them clickable. Acme allows to make any text clickable and set the selection to a plumber, for action. A path, a git hash, a time stamp, whatever. This is so much better. Some terminal enulators can be used like that, foot natively on wayland, st with patches and urxvt with Perl extensions.
I dropped syntax highlighting a few years ago. My thoughts on it are not "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine." I don't like the computer trying to convey what is important in my text files to me via color. What I think is important and what the computer thinks is important is often different. Then why don't I configure my syntax highlighter to agree with me? It's just another configuration file to keep in sync on the computers I use, and :syntax off is right there... It's the nuclear option for being annoyed that comments are shown in light gray.
Acme on Unix is almost as good as Acme on Plan 9, but I can't stress enough how great it is on a real Plan 9 system inside rio.
p9p acme does introduce multi-line tag displays, though, which is hugely convenient when I want to keep track of lots of line numbers or hold a bunch of Edit commands.
The multi-line tag also helps a lot outside of plan9 because the file paths on plan9 tend to be shorter thanks to the per-process namespaces. e.g. instead of /home/$user/projects/foo you can just bind that to /prj/foo or whatever you like.
I certainly knew about the connections between Go (and so very much other stuff at Google) and Plan 9. I was surprised, at the time, to see the OS itself in use in a production role. Just another example of unexpected tools getting the job done.
I once almost bought a massive Xerox printer from a graphics shop that was decommissioning it. It had a Xerox Star (running some specialized software) for its brains.
In the end, the workstation was so completely fused to the printer I'd end with a car-sized workstation.
> I don't know if the Go releases are still done on Plan 9, but it seems likely that's still an active use of the OS.
Go still builds. It's just difficult to build it out of the box on 9 because of bootstrap issues. Though not sure if the latest 9 build bug was squashed.
> Plan 9 is as filled with unpolished brilliance as Mozart’s Requiem. It’s the Sagrada Familia of Operating Systems. It’s creators left long ago but people keep building on the scaffolds. If nothing else, it’s a collection of fantastic ideas never intended for mass consumption. This is The Holy Mountain of Operating Systems.
Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo.
HA! This reminded me of the OS class I took in college.
Every professor other than mine taught Linux, but he made us learn Inferno. (One of the best learning experiences of my time there!)
If you're interested in the inner workings of Inferno he literally wrote the, only(?), book on it. There are a couple free excerpts available on his site.[0]
Your professor didn't start doing that at your university. I knew who you were talking about before even visiting your link, although the home directory sealed it: Brian Stuart. Very useful to study (and modify) a small OS.
AFIK Inferno was a corporate reaction to Java and intended to be an actual competing product. Plan 9 development was halted for nearly a whole year as the team focused on building Inferno.
It was pretty cool. I did a few capability demos for my team back in 2000 using the IE plugin + Limbo + Tk stuff as a replacement for some really bad Perl configuration tools, but could never get any momentum with it. Wish I (and the plan9/Inferno) people were better salespeople.
I taught myself Tcl/Tk back in the 90's. It was relatively simple to develop UIs with it. I remember the Tk layout manager was more pleasant than fighting with CSS...
While I absolutely LOVE Inferno "philosophically", I agree it doesn't win UI beauty awards... the source is all there and I could probably show my love there by updating things.
Pike, Thompson, Presotto, Collyer, McKie, none of these people contribute to either 9front or 9legacy, beyond providing the original Plan 9 code base which underlies all the forks.
The creators of plan9 are not involved in 9front, and I don't think they were ever involved with 9legacy, unless I've missed something. I believe 9front's (rather colorful) user manual pointedly remarks that the original authors of plan9 have long since abandoned the project.
I enjoyed this article and was impressed with how far the author got in each day's exploration.
I always thought Plan9 should have had a comeback as part of the "Internet of Things" given its deep support for networking and its modest hardware requirements (it was designed in the 90s.)
The problem is drivers. They haven't kept up so far as I know and the list of supported hardware is short. Personally I'd love for that to change, but it isn't something I can do.
The list of supported hardware is short, but surprisingly accessible. It's likely that random bargain bin hardware will not be fully supported, but with a few minutes of research it's easy to pick out something that will -- like used Thinkpad.
We even managed to get arm64 support on the Raspberry pi before Ubuntu. :)
The more I read about some of the operating systems eventually died out (mostly), the more disappointed I am that the only realistic options for workstation/server OS’s are Windows and a handful of Unix-like systems.
Doing the first 90% of an operating system is pretty straightforward. Doing fun demos with it is fun. But Microsoft is severely underrated for its incredible skill in, and ability to put massive resources behind, the last 10%. That includes stuff like device drivers, getting hundreds of thousands of disparate components to work together, supporting hundreds of file formats, working with a gigantic landscape of vendors, 35 years of compatibility, and so forth. Microsoft is the only reason you and I can buy a perfectly capable laptop for $500.
I would be very curious to see a list of features which were available in defunct OSes that are not available or only available via kludge these days. There are some great ideas still out there in the wild.
- 64-bit, journaled, UTF-8 capable, extended attributes: things that are standard today but novel at the time
- It had "live queries" meaning feeds into file changes. AFAIK only NTFS has that today with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal. Inotify is a hack: have you tried monitoring your root folder ?
AmigaOS had (well, has, but it's pretty much defunct) a lot of interesting things such as ARexx, DataTypes, Assigns and a standardized software installer.
Interlisp/Medley has sort of revived as an application that runs on your computer: https://interlisp.org/
There’s also Mezzano which is a relatively new, from scratch Common Lisp implementation on bare metal: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
Finally, if you know where to look, it’s possible to setup a Symbolics VM on Linux, which is somewhat interesting to poke around in (all the manuals available out of the box are pretty interesting to read through.)
Plan 9 was a legitimate research operating system developed by computer scientists who had a key role in the development of UNIX and other highly-regarded pieces of software.
Plan 9-based technologies are a part of most, if not all, operating systems today (even Windows!).
But, a fun article, and I'm always happy to see Plan 9 crop up from time to time. It's at risk of being forgotten, but shouldn't be.
> Plan 9-based technologies are a part of most, if not all, operating systems today (even Windows!).
9p is indeed a great technology—I would have also thrown in utf-8—but most of plan9's ideas remain quite fringe. I would pay a ton of money for an OS with both bind and browser support. Plumber is still leagues better than anything offered by macs/linux/windows.
That said, I don't see "fringe" as being mutually exclusive with "legitimate". TempleOS had some features that other OS's could use, too—its use of hyperlinking is actually really cool.
What the actual fuck. At first I thought this was some joke in poor taste by the blog post, but in fact he is referring to the use of Nazi death camp imagery in the documentation. That's not cool.
Considering the ubiquitous Touhou references (https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Cirno#Personality), I would assume that the project is at least 4chan-adjacent (or at least adjacent to the culture of 4chan's early days; the demographic transition from people pretending to be [bad thing] to actual [bad thing] people who are not in on the joke is a matter of internet lore). This makes it quite likely that this is exactly the reaction the authors were hoping for, with the intention of keeping out the first group in the blog post's trichotomy ("Those who won’t use 9Front because of it, those whose choice is unaffected by it, and those feeling welcomed by it.").
I would go so far as to say that 9front's marketing works to try and attract only the second group in that trichotomy. The first page is footed with BLM and antifascist logos. Plan 9 is everything an old-school 4chan technology poster is interested in, and they're hard-wired to offend through whatever means possible.
Yes, the person who committed it was a high school teenager at the time. Maturity and good taste isn't generally associated with high schoolers. It was tasteless. And it was reverted.
My family is full of holocaust survivors. My grandmother passed through Auschwitz. 10 of her 12 siblings did not.
I am fairly heavily involved in 9front. I have never had any issues with anyone in that project -- certainly none to do with antisemitism.
If you feel you have to tell me that your family is full of holocaust survivors before you tell me you're involved in a software distro, something is very wrong. This is software not biker gangs. I'm not judging you. I hope you understand that. One or two other people maybe, but not you.
I've not called anyone a Nazi. I didn't commit Mein Kampf twice. I didn't put an Auschwitz joke in the manual. Neither did you.
It was this[1] that convinced me to spend time with Plan 9. I've spoken to some really nice 9Front users and contributors. I've read and watched cool things by people like mycroft, Sigrid and yourself. Then at the other end of the scale there's this:
For every person you explain to, there are many more who just call you all a bunch of Nazis. People have slid into my DMs and just outright openly called everyone in 9Front nazis for over a week now. The idea is ridiculous yet it persists. That's obviously not the association you want for yourself, but it's one you're aware of or you wouldn't be here.
It's happening right now here: https://mastodon.social/@Ludonaut/105555232277945673 - that's just one place, there are plenty others. My Signal's full of it, Telegram too. Memes, some pretty personal, the lot.
You can't whack-a-mole that association. All you can do is choose to change it or choose to own it.
EDIT: Seems I can't reply to Ori directly so here it is: No I'm not insinuating you're a Nazi sympathizer. I wouldn't. The whole point of my reply is that you are not and I know you are not but lots of others won't draw that conclusion and you won't be able to correct them all. If I thought you were involved in that sort of shit I'd come straight out with it.
Ok Ori, you believe what you want to believe. I've been 100% up-front about everything so far. If you're relying on insinuations then you're reading into stuff that just isn't there. You're the third 9Front guy to come at me, and I'm done trying to be polite about it so I'll withdraw.
> If you feel you have to tell me that your family is full of holocaust survivors before you tell me you're involved in a software distro, something is very wrong.
Let me put it another way: You are insinuating that I'm a nazi sympathizer. That is indeed very wrong, and the statement above is directly related to the insinuation I was responding to.
Please state your insinuations out loud. Then get fucked.
Edit:
> EDIT: Seems I can't reply to Ori directly so here it is: No I'm not insinuating you're a Nazi sympathizer. I wouldn't. If I thought you were I'd come straight out with it.
Great. You're implying something you don't even claim to believe. Take some responsibility for your words.
If you think the accusations are "ridiculous", why are you doing your best to amplify them?
Hi. I made that image. I was searching for 'rails documentation' and accidentally hit the 'Images' link. That photo was in the first page of results. Its presence was so absurd and out of place that I felt like I had to do something with it. It was made in an era before actual Nazis had re-entered the public dialogue, so it felt like Google Image Search was denigrating Ruby on Rails by including this sort of imagery in the results.
Generally speaking, 4chan types read it as an endorsement, which sucks. More recently, people who are not assholes have also begun to read it as an endorsement, which is even more unfortunate.
I had a conversation on Mastodon with the author, where I explained some of this, but the author's followers filled my client with Nazi (and more) accusations, and then the author started demanding names of responsible parties and I didn't really feel like he was engaging in good faith. Probably could have gone better, but here we are.
This whole sort of thing has led to much confusion, which is why over the years the project home page has sprouted explicit anti-Nazi and Black Lives Matter links. As far as I am aware, there are no anti-semites (or other brands of racist) involved in the project.
and an edit: A couple of replies here ask the reasonable question: "why not just remove the image?" Bluntly, if we removed everything that confused or angered people, it would be a full-time job. It's more likely that we'll include some version of the above in order to further clarify our rejection of Nazi values and provide the context that was missing.
Besides, if we just delete the damn thing then the next message will be "9front devs are secret Nazis, look at archive.org" -- we've been down this road before with other contentious content.
I don't really understand why you wouldn't just remove the image then. I get that you added it for its absurdity, but if many people take it as an endorsement, isn't it just a joke that didn't land? Personally I think it's a joke in poor taste, but even if you don't, it seems like such a weird hill to die on.
Can you please just remove the image? The context is obscure and long gone, and I doubt there is any way for an outsider to see it as anything other than a hateful meme targeted at ruby, given the context of the rest of the memes on that page.
Edit to respond to your edit: please can you commit to removing or changing anything else in your documentation that confuses or angers people? I think you have an understanding that having good quality, accessible documentation is important. So why not commit to having that? It's entirely what documentation writers are supposed to do. It doesn't have to be a full time job unless someone wants it to be, you can do the process of improving things slowly, one step at a time with everyone chipping in. Do you really want things to stop here where some of your documentation pages look like a twitter feed?
And I say this because I think it's somewhat of an inevitability -- over time, someone has to remove the memes and in-jokes. There is no way a newcomer is ever going to understand what they all mean. Yes people can look in archive.org but that's less important than what's actively on the website.
> Was it Uriel that committed that section? I could kind of understand not wanting to remove it if it was. If that's the case then context in the FQA might be helpful for people who stumble across it.
That's hardly demanding names, unless you're referring to somewhere else in the convo. In that case please feel free to point it out.
There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal.
The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.
> There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal.
Sure, I can see that and thanks for raising that. It wasn't intended that way but I can see how it came across. Some mediums are just poor for discussion and text is always poor for expressing context.
> The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.
I got that sense from you at the time. I get that you've all been attacked heavily at different points. I don't think there's any way you couldn't have felt that vibe. I've seen people call you guys out to me since on a scale that I've not seen elsewhere.
The bit I didn't know is the how you operate in general. As an outsider that's just not info I have.
I genuinely had links and samples for Appendix L's C section - if you look at the post you'll see the drawing screenshot and references to building blocks. Not knowing how you guys worked, I perhaps wrongly assumed that this might've been welcome, but wasn't comfortable putting it in with that image there. I genuinely wasn't trying to gotcha you.
I'm sure you can imagine how I received that: "we don't care what you actually believe, we only care about appendix L of the documentation."
People have been calling us Nazis since day one -- we have several German developers so we make VW and BMW jokes about 'German engineering' and of course all the early-cold-war German rocket scientists. It's the reason we've got the photo of Bowie at Victoria Station -- photographed while waving to the crowd, he had to repeatedly deny being a Nazi afterward, because it sure looked like a Nazi salute in the photo.
Once the actual Nazis started showing up we had to get more explicit in our condemnation of their evil, and that's okay -- rejecting hate is the easy part. Defending ourselves against the people we agree with is much harder.
Yeah I can see that now. Thanks. I guess once you process the first bit that way the rest drops off.
By the no nazis bit not meaning anything what I meant there was that with everything else it can be hard to tell what's intentional on the site and what isn't.
I honestly don't care who calls you guys nazis or not. Even if I wanted to (which I don't, I gain nothing by doing so) I wouldn't need to. There are plenty of people doing that already. The harder thing to do is to try to understand without pre-judging. Thanks for clearing a lot of this up.
EDIT: I noticed this in another subthread:
> I do think the image should be provided with context.
I'm editing here because I don't want to add to the pile-on in the other thread. You mentioned this above:
> Once the actual Nazis started showing up we had to get more explicit in our condemnation of their evil
If you want to keep the picture, what would your thoughts be on a log of that condemnation linked from somewhere in the FQA? Not necessarily Appendix L. No skin off my nose either way but I thought I'd mention it in case nobody had thought of it.
We've been discussing it; we'll probably remove the image but add the context. Next time you find something that makes you like this, would you please send a patch (or at least report a bug)? It's sheer chance that I ran across your original Mastodon post at all.
except you aren't being asked to remove everything that offends anyone, you are specifically being asked to remove this one instance of holocaust imagery. You are hiding behind a slippery slope fallacy to avoid doing this. You can remove the image then immediately go back to your policy of not removing things. see how easy that was? And as for people complaining about archive.org, can't you just ignore them like you are ignoring this? Your logic doesn't hold up. You either don't want to admit you were wrong or you just don't want to remove the image period. That's your decision but you should have the guts to stand behind it.
I don't want to just silently remove the image. I'm not in the habit of editing myself to suit the passersby. I do think the image should be provided with context. It is not the only thing associated with 9front that people have targeted for removal.
I am not 'ignoring this.' I am addressing it right here, and on Mastodon. I enjoy it when Internet people make throwaway accounts to accuse me of cowardice, but I'm confused about which 'guts' I'm lacking. Is it the one where I did something, took responsibility for it, explained my actions, and then engaged in conversation with people who were concerned about my motives?
It's where you claimed you couldn't remove it because then people would make more demands of you. That's the gutless part. Hiding behind a hypothetical. Glad I could clear it up. Also this is my first hacker news account not a throwaway.
Given a choice between deleting things that might make me look bad and explaining the choices that I make, I will always choose the latter. It's the only surefire opportunity for me to learn.
I suspect that the argument of "You should violate your personal principles because I want you to (just this once for me, and then you can go back to not violating them)" coming from an anonymous account on an internet message board is too flimsy to consider.
"Bluntly, if we removed everything that confused or angered people, it would be a full-time job. It's more likely that we'll include some version of the above in order to further clarify our rejection of Nazi values and provide the context that was missing."
Bluntly, this is just a lame excuse. Where i live, denying the holocaust and related actions are considered criminal offenses that can land you in jail for quite some time. While this picture might not be seen as such by itself, what else am i to expect from a project that does something like this? It sure sends some very bad vibes.
So please, just remove the image. There are no arguments for keeping it.
You wrote: "If we removed everything that confused or angered people, it would be a full-time job"
If I rephrase it as "Let's keep the Nazi pictures that confuse and anger people because it would be too much work to remove them", does that help you understand why people aren't happy with your decision?
I don't know if the Go releases are still done on Plan 9, but it seems likely that's still an active use of the OS.
reply