I installed Plan 9 today on a spare disc I had lying around. Plan 9 is an operating system which in may ways resembles Unix — only with a much much cleaner design. A lot of people say that in Unix everything is a file; this is not entirely true as many (especially network) resources are simply not available in the filesystem. In Plan 9 everything is available in the filesystem — directly.
I think that Plan 9, the operating system, is a very well designed system with a lot of great thinking — quite frankly I doubt that there is anything out there that is any better with regards to abstraction. It, however, does deserve to be called two things: unfriendly and extremely friendly. It is unfriendly not by design, but by the state it’s in — so I guess that’s not really something I should be writing at all. The unfriendliness does not come from Plan 9′s design itself but rather from the software it carries. This is very much so, possible to fix. I doubt that the current set of developers are willing to do this though as they seem to be content with the current status quo. It is extremely friendly to those who know what they are doing and allows complete — as in with no exceptions — control over the system using text manipulating programs like awk, sed and grep.
It’s damn ugly though.
