Plan9 was far superior as a developer's system. It's text based tools are the best, bar none. But really it owes that to Project Oberon.
"Everything is a file" as an abstraction enables you to build really powerful through composition. e.g. running TCP/IP over a serial connection just by mounting files in certain places.
Your end user program doesn't need to know anything about networking, it just reads from files.
It's not perfect, of course, it had problems with throughput - we were forever discussing at conferences how to improve the protocol to implement streaming.
I describe it as a racing car, not everyone can drive it, you need to work to keep it going, you might kill yourself but when you're out front, it feels amazing.
"Everything is a file" as an abstraction enables you to build really powerful through composition. e.g. running TCP/IP over a serial connection just by mounting files in certain places.
Your end user program doesn't need to know anything about networking, it just reads from files.
this is an irc bot written in shell script
http://proweb.co.uk/~matt/chugly.rc
It's not perfect, of course, it had problems with throughput - we were forever discussing at conferences how to improve the protocol to implement streaming.
I describe it as a racing car, not everyone can drive it, you need to work to keep it going, you might kill yourself but when you're out front, it feels amazing.