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Dennis Ritchie Interview

Posted by Hemos on from the talking-with-a-guru dept.

A reader wrote to us with the news that Linuxworld is currently running an interview with Dennis Ritchie, Unix guy, C author, and Plan 9 [?] proponent.

1 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Re:bitter rant by rpeppe · · Score: 5
    (Really pushes it hardest??? Oh right, as opposed to Linux where so many of my devices aren't represented as files. Let's face it, a friend of mine cats vi to /dev/audio for an alarm clock. How much harder can you push the concept? )

    lots harder.
    in plan 9, any old program can present a filesystem, and it can then interpret operations on that filesystem at will. basically, you can mount one end of a pipe. filesystem requests on any file or directory below the mountpoint turn into RPC messages down the pipe. so MIME mailboxes are presented as a filesystem, the editor cum window system acme allows program interaction through a filesystem, access to ftp is provided through a filesystem, etc, etc.

    plan 9 doesn't have an ioctl call, which means that an enormous amount of functionality is available via straight shell commands (echo, cat, et al).

    ok, so the ideas might not be completely new, but the implementation works really well in practise. and it means that a sophisticated system can be built out of small chunks of code, which in turn means that the whole system is more understandable and more reliable.

    i can create windows with echo, look back through history with cd and extract parts of cpio archives with cat - and all of this functionality can be transparently exported and imported securely across the net.

    tell me that's not pushing it further!