30 Jan
2023
30 Jan
'23
9:45 p.m.
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:35:25AM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
Plan 9 was different, and a lot of people who were
familiar with Unix
didn't like that, and were not interested in trying out a different
way if it meant that they couldn't bring their existing mental models
and workflows into the new environment unchanged.
At one point it struck me that Plan 9 didn't succeed as a widespread
replacement for Unix/Linux because it was bad or incapable, but
rather, because people wanted Linux, and not plan9.
Many people make that mistake. New stuff instead of extend old stuff.
Look at programming languages for instance. We had C, it was pretty
simple to understand, but people wanted more stuff. So now we have
things like Rust that is pretty much completely different. Could we
not have extended C to do what Rust does? Why do we need an entirely
different syntax to say the same things?
Seems like Plan 9 fell into that trap. When you invalidate all of the
existing knowledge that people have, that creates a barrier to entry.
As you said, people don't want to give up their mental model when that
model works. They'll only give it up when there is at least a factor
of 2 improvement that they care about. These days it feels like people
are stuck enough that they want a factor of 10.