p9idf's comments

The Bell monopoly invented the transistor. I think there's a credible claim that could be made that the invention of the transistor was healthy for the economy.

Among programmers, Plan 9 is not so obscure. Anyone with an interest in programming something besides a commodity system has stumbled across it or seen it mentioned somewhere. Plan 9 was built to be practical and its authors wrote about its practical advantages at length, so anyone who cares can just go to the web site and read about it. Anyone who wants or has an interest in what Plan 9 offers already has everything they need.

Instead of telling people what they either don't care about or already know, I'd rather spend my own time writing my own programs. Unless someone is waving dollar bills in front of my face, I have no interest in convincing people that they should use a research operating system that doesn't fit their needs so they can write programs for it to fit their needs. Unless I'm getting paid or feeling uncharacteristically generous with my time, I'm not going to take too close an interest with what other people do with their computers.

All of the features fantasized about in this thread you could write yourself if you wanted to and had the time and money. If the person lamenting the lack of a spreadsheet program lacks either the time or money or interest to write it, it shouldn't be much surprise that everyone else lacks them too. It is unreasonable to dismiss a system because no uncommonly charitable programmer has donated their time to write programs that they don't personally need or get paid for. Toilets are valuable enough that people pay plumbers to put them in their houses so they don't have to piss on their mattresses, but apparently no one can think of anything valuable enough about a Plan 9 word processor that they would be willing to do anything that would make it a reality.

Really none of this is specific to Plan 9 or even to computers. Maybe I should have bit my tongue, rolled my eyes, and kept quiet like I normally do.

† It does.

"Nobody will [care] about your [...] operating system if it consistently fails to be useful for day-to-day work."

Nobody except those who already find it useful for their day-to-day work, some of whom have already explained the system's utility to them in this thread. Only if you think popularity is the only way to judge the utility of a computer operating system can you so easily dismiss such a large and influential body of work.

I posed a question earlier which you didn't address, and if you think chasing after mass appeal isn't pointless you should have an answer for: What would a word processor or web browser on Plan 9 (which everyone here seems to agree is cool) enable you to do that you can't already do elsewhere?

It's not meant to be built around any language. If there's a language you want to use, just start using it. All you need is access to the system calls. The whole point of making everything a file system is so that you don't have to cram everything together in the same address space. There's no foreign function interfaces or calling conventions you have to deal with if you want to use a new language with the system. It's all reads and writes. Ocaml, Haskell, and ML all have read and write, so if you want to use a less primitive language, there's nothing stopping you.

  King George II
  Kermit Project
  612 W 115th St
  New York, NY 10025-7721

  (while :; do cat ; sleep 2 ; done) <file

Pipes on Plan 9 use the same pipe, read, write, and close system calls as Unix does; they are an equivalent amount of work to use (or adopt, as you say).