It's hard to recall conversations from 1994, but I came away with the overwhelming sense that the Plan 9 guys thought shared libraries were bogus - certainly that they were bogus for the non-plugin use case (which is the one that pertains to this discussion; libraries like Motif were not plugins). So you've accused me of raising a strawman (actually a "starwman" - "he'd like to cwome and mweet us, but he thinks he'd blow our mwinds") by raising a point absolutely not germane to the discussion, but you when refute my point with this devastating rebuttal:
"For everything else, not so much".
Most people I know also use the web and menus and buttons and dialog boxes and so forth and expect all this stuff to look vaguely like other computers do. The fact that the Plan 9 folks were trundling over to non-P9 machines to read the web seemed to suggest that they also liked seeing things that weren't just text in plain boxes.
The point remains that these two propositions are both at the least contentious, and only by combining these unrelated points could anyone really seriously take Plan 9's approach to shared libraries (at the time) seriously.
If Plan 9 guys really thought shared libraries were bogus, they wouldn't have created the follow up version heavily based on dynamic packages for Limbo.
"For everything else, not so much".
Most people I know also use the web and menus and buttons and dialog boxes and so forth and expect all this stuff to look vaguely like other computers do. The fact that the Plan 9 folks were trundling over to non-P9 machines to read the web seemed to suggest that they also liked seeing things that weren't just text in plain boxes.
The point remains that these two propositions are both at the least contentious, and only by combining these unrelated points could anyone really seriously take Plan 9's approach to shared libraries (at the time) seriously.