Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems

Re:Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating s... by ainar-g on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @06:42AM (#22364728)

We already did that. It was called Plan 9 From Bell Labs[1]. And while it gave us UTF-8, procfs, 9P, etc, it failed to become a popular OS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

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Re:Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating s... by jamesrcole on Thursday February 20, 2020 @03:17AM (#22373547)

The important question here is, why? Was it because of those features? Or something else?

I don't know, but one major factor in OS adoption is network effects. "The rich get richer", and it's very hard to introduce a new and different system, no matter how good it is.

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Re:Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating s... by teddyh on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @07:18AM (#22412539)

Unlike Unix, which was basically free software and therefore extendable and available for companies to build their own versions of, Plan 9 was proprietary from Bell Labs.

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Re:Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating s... by hhas01 on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @07:44AM (#22364945)

Ah, Plan 9. Vastly superior to its predecessor in every way, except the one that counts: bums on seats.

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Re:Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating s... by teddyh on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:46PM (#22367935)

And, for a long time, price/licensing.

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