Slight critique here - I feel like he's using this to push an agenda rather than just telling us in detail what tools and software he uses to get his job done.
He mentions a few things but in far less detail than anyone else I've read on usesthis. Instead he gives paragraph after paragraph of "world view" about moving things to the cloud...interesting, yes, but not what I'm after when I read usesthis posts... :-/
back
6 comments
What? No!
He's not pushing for a move to the cloud. He actually did criticize the way we're building the cloud today:
> "This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon."
To understand what he's talking about, keep in mind that Pike was a lead engineer on Plan9, a project aiming at creating the exact environment he's describing. And although the project never left the lab, it did affect the lives of the scientists working there. There are many reasons why Plan9 never went mainstream, but one thing is sure it was not technical inferiority.
I don't think Pike is pushing for any agenda. I tried Plan9, and I see what he's talking about. Lack of widespread support and the relatively small number of available apps make it difficult to be the "primary" OS I use, but the design concepts like "everything is a file", union mounts or 9P are amazing and work like he describes.
When a world renown OS scientist is asked about his "ideal setup", what answer would you expect? "I wish I could get the latest version of MacOSX and the newest chip by Nvidia"??
Plan 9 did leave Bell Labs, http://www.york.ac.uk/ used it for one, and it was released under a more free licence in time.
The problem with asking Unix users about their tools is that you'll get a long list, and the interesting part is more about how they connect them. While I personally would be interested in a long treatise on how he combines shell-scripts and plubming actions in acme to get his coding/documenting/project management work done, this is probably a bit too long (and maybe technical) for a usesthis post.
It's certainly easier with your average Mac user's "I write my code in TextMate, use Things for GTD and manage my foodie photo library in Sepia Extreme".
One of the success of plan9 was to reduce the number of tools (and the number of command line options for the tools). For example ftp and the option -r of cp have been killed.
Plan9 is marvellous. The only reason I do not install it for my everyday use is that it is not a mainstream OS (with up to date chrome, openoffice, XBMC and virtualbox)
If it had all of those things, it wouldn't really be Plan 9 any more.
Grab a decent Linux box, shove it under your desk, and use VNC or X forwarding to display those programs on your Plan 9 terminal. You can keep your storage on a Plan 9 file server, then have your Linux box mount that (9p support is in Linux).
Or, if you're willing to put up with some slightly outdated software, Linuxemu can be a decent choice.
It's doable. I did an awful lot of my graduate work sitting at a Plan 9 terminal, from writing code to just browsing the web with Opera.
A separate, contained server to run programs that can't talk to anything else is sort of against the whole Plan 9 idea, it's basically what Pike is complaining about here. All you did was turn a Plan 9 into a dumb terminal and NAS. Why would I do that when I could ditch the Plan 9 box and save money just by having the Linux machine, which apparently was needed for running everything in the first place.
The idea of Plan 9 was not to have no user applications running on it.
I imagine that Dr Pike spends most of the working day in the text editor that he wrote. He stated that he adds as little as possible to a stock Mac OS X install so that he can change the computer he uses easily.
The worldview bit was interesting because Dr Pike regards the way we access computing power as important and that the modes of access we have available may influence our lives. I think that he is right, but I prefer to have control of my stuff, so I tend towards synchronised local storage.
Aw, sorry about that. I guess it's a nice break from the normality, maybe? :)
I liked it. It's nice to see a guy's thoughts on how he thinks computing should be. Especially if its someone like Rob Pike. (Better than the usual stream of Macbook-Pro-with-24"-Cinema-Display which is what everyone seems to be using)
Macbook Pro, vim, and git. Honestly, when there's a discussion of people's work setup on HN, that's kind of what I assume it's going to be.
Don't forget about those crazy people that use emacs instead of vim...
Also, don't forget about those even crazier people (e.g., myself) who prefer a more traditional vi (e.g., nvi) to vim.
Yup! Agreed.
Which it's far more interesting, though.
My gut reaction was the same, I'm more interested in the technical solutions the experts have come up with. The cloud idea is interesting, but I've already got git and vim everywhere so it's not a radical idea for me. I wish he had gone into more detail regarding acme, I bet that would be fascinating.
He already has gone into great detail about acme: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/