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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Plan 9 doesn't seem to have any compelling articulated arguments for any use cases that make it worth looking at beyond mere academic interest.

If we want to look at it from a non-academic standpoint, the lack of these tools makes it unpleasant, and the lack of use cases makes it seem a waste of time to investigate.

The argument of "If you want these features, write them yourself" is not wrong, but it ain't winning any friends either.

A simple thing that the Plan 9 fans could do would be to explain what cases would justify picking it over some other *nix--that alone might be enough to get some of us busier programmers to justify sinking our (small) free time into adding stuff to it.

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I guess I didn't explain my popularity contest arguments from earlier very well because since this is where all Plan 9 discussions end up, I took it for granted, but this winning friends and evangelizing stuff is what I was talking about.

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.

So, I'll be more blunt:

For a system that is supposed to be so pragmatic and practical, it seems quite odd that there isn't a list of reasons to use it in production or a list of people using it for actual business.

I'm going to call bullshit on Plan 9 as a practical operating system without at least one of those pieces of information.

I know of at least one company (name escapes me) that uses the 9P format for practical communication and file work. I know of nobody (none) using either Inferno or Plan 9 as a system, unless you count a sad effort by /g/ or a few loons on IRC.

It's not simply enough to talk about namespaces, or simplicity of porting things, or the awesomeness of the everything-is-a-file-no-really-we-mean-it-this-time, unless you tie that back into the real world and show how it is a clear improvement over the existing tech.

That nobody has done this, and that nobody cares enough to evangelize it, means that the Plan 9 community will be nothing more than an interesting footnote until it is forgotten entirely.

You were blunt enough the first time. I don't care what you do on your computer. I can continue happily writing programs after you've forgotten about Plan 9. If people stop nagging me to write them a stupid web browser, and I stop nagging people to use my stupid toy operating system, everyone can be happy that way.

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