30 Jan
2023
30 Jan
'23
10:57 p.m.
On Monday, January 30, 2023, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Smells like C++ to me. Rust in essence is a re-implementation of C++ not C.
It tries to pack as much features as it possibly can.
I don't know of any other language that throughout the years remained as
pure and minimal as C. (maybe Forth).
Linux came out in the right place at the right time, right around the time
when the Internet really became a cyberspace spanning the whole globe.
Finland was first connected to the Internet in 1989. Linus bought his first
386DX33 in January 1991.
To me Linux represented a revolution in computing. It built on the
shoulders of Unix forefathers but at the same time was a breath of fresh
air in the Unix space. Young people at the time wanted that. That's why it
became so wildly popular. It was a completely free, idealistic worldwide
movement. It brought together a diverse group of people: university Unix
programmers, home computer enthusiasts and demoscene hackers who just
recently replaced their 8-bit C64's and Atari's with fresh 386-based PCs,
young security hackers who watched too much War Games, etc. It was a very
fresh movement at the time.
--Andy
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:45 AM Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I would argue that Linux actually did a lot of things differently. It tried
to conform to POSIX, but still there were a lof of fresh ideas that
actually took off.
It was not possible in the free BSD world which inherited much more from
the old Unix world.
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 10:35:25AM -0500, Dan
Cross wrote:
Some would argue that's not a mistake. How else do we innovate if
we're just incrementally polishing what's come before? 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. 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?
People tried to extend C to do the things that Rust does and it didn't
work. 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.
Plan 9, as a research system, was an experiment in doing things
differently. As a research system, it was remarkably influential: a
lot of the ideas made it into e.g. Linux. Imitation is the most
sincere form of flattery. As a production system, people just wanted
Linux. There was a time when people wanted to try out new ideas; oh
well.